Ideological Exploration Quotes

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.

I'm totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I'm looking to have my views challenged. I'm looking to be corrected.

I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

And as long as we believe what we believe - until that is questioned - there's no progress as a human race. Again, we still have war. So, effective rehabilitation is to question what we believe. When that happens, everyone gets out of prison.

I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.

I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.

Fiction has always been a way of examining society and its flaws and trying to expose them.

I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and they got broken down into my body, and I sweated it out. It's not because I want to talk about 'issues.' For me, a novel is a way of seeing the world.

I grew up in a household that really encouraged reading and writing. My mother loves philosophy and is constantly reading philosophy and talking to me about different philosophers and different ways of life.

I make films to explore concepts and raise questions, not tell the audience what to think.

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

I'm just a philosophical journalist, trying to describe what's going on. I want to stimulate conversations, and hope out of them will come truths.

In movies that tackle these political issues, there are far more interesting themes to be explored than partisan politics, which is what we get on cable news every second of every day.

My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

When lost in a forest go always down hill. When lost in a philosophy or doctrine go upward.

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

You don't see artists sitting around a lot, talking about ideology. They find out what they believe, and what they're doing, by doing it.

Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas.

I was very resistant to my intellectualism for a while. I do start with an intellectual idea for a character. A lot of the times, it'll be the opposite of what I feel like is on the page, or it'll be just an idea that I read in a psychology textbook or in a philosophy book. I'll apply something to it that I can start to tinker with.

With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I'm more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.