The culture of critique undermines the spirit not only of people in public roles but of those who read about them, afraid to believe in anyone or anything because the next story... will tell them why they shouldn't.
I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done.
There are roles out there and women out there that are fascinating to me, and there are things in our culture that I see that I want to express. It's my passion to express that.
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
As someone who escaped religious persecution in Lebanon and whose parents were kidnapped in Beirut, I fully support the protection of all individuals from institutional discrimination. That said, I am weary of the ethos of victimhood that has parasitized our culture.
If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.
We must challenge a culture that is based on too much meanness and not enough meaning.
Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world.
Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.
The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.
So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?
I think comedians have a function in society, which is to make fun of our icons.
It's almost un-American to say that you want to change football.
America is a great country. I've been in the south, in the center and in the north. I like it. Americans are very good people. There's just too much air-conditioning.
Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
'Suburbicon' feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it's both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney's never had.
The definition of political cinema is one I don't agree with, because every film, every show, is typically political in nature. Political cinema is simply the brainchild of bad journalists.
Every intellectual attitude is latently political.
I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.
I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.
No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.
