National Arts Quotes

#1. The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

Wynton Marsalis

#2. There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.

Marsha Norman

#3. To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.

Randy Sandke

#4. Believe it or not, there are places in the world where music is important. There are places in the world where all the arts are a matter of national pride.

Frank Zappa

#5. I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.

Gore Vidal

#6. When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

Norman Lock

#7. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9

Daniel H. Pink

#8. Hopefully, you will glimpse something of your own life's journey and with Elemental's Power of Illuminated Love, possibly recognize and celebrate something you had not been able to recognize or celebrate before.

Luther E. Vann

#9. What liberals mean by 'goose-stepping' or 'ethnic cleansing' is generally something along the lines of 'eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.' But they can't say that, or people would realize they're crazy.

Ann Coulter

#10. I was a little press writer when the National Endowment for the Arts came to my rescue and gave me an award. I couldn't buy a light bulb. Almost more than the money, the awards are important because they show that someone believes in you.

Sandra Cisneros

#11. 'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#12. The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.

Wynton Marsalis

#13. Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London's leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National's role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.

Lloyd Dorfman

#14. As President, I will end once and for all the use of taxpayer funds to promote the National Endowment for the Arts and other programs that subsidize amoral and degrading activities.

Gary Bauer

#15. When I graduated from high school, I had artistic and academic scholarships, and I was trying to figure out what to do. I decided to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Juilliard and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Australia.

Deborah Kara Unger

#16. The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity.

Charlotte Bydler

#17. What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dean Bakopoulos

#18. We need to cut these things that aren't constitutionally mandated, that are kind of on the periphery, the fluffery, like NPR and National Endowment for the Arts. Those are obvious.

Sarah Palin

#19. Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

Aberjhani

#20. Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

Theodore Bikel

#21. Art should be for sale. The artist should not.

A.E. Samaan

#22. At the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement,

Walter Isaacson

#23. All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.

Ann Macbeth

#24. President Obama awarded a National Medal of Arts to author Stephen King. You know, because if there's anyone who can relate to the story of a guy trapped in a mansion that's driving him insane, it's Obama.

Jimmy Fallon

#25. I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#26. Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

Nat Hentoff

#27. I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#28. That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done.

David Selby

#29. Mr. Chairman, obviously a $60 million cut in the National Endowment for the Arts would be a disaster.

Norm Dicks

#30. My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer.

Leon Jouhaux

#31. I asked the man on the phone from the National Endowment for the Arts what this fellowship entailed, and he said, 'Well, first there's $10,000.' I asked him, 'Can I pay it in installments?'

Johnny Gimble

#32. This funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has been like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Norm Dicks

#33. I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.

Jerry Pinkney

#34. In hindsight I can see that my love for the arts began by watching my father and his colleagues perform on stage in Jamaica, and running a muck among the exhibits of fabulous Jamaican art at the National Gallery while mum was upstairs curating.

Michael Hyatt