The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.

Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.

Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.

What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for …

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.