Perpetuating Quotes

I try not to let my politics limit me artistically, and you know say like "well I can`t do that because I don`t ever want to play a black prostitute" or "I can`t do that because I don`t ever want to play,you know a drug addict". I really try not to do that.What`s important to me is to make sure my characters ring true that they reflect a trueness to society because if I can bring out the true humanity of a character than I`m not perpetuating a stereotype I`m actually revealing a truth.

(On John Wayne`s 1971 interview with Playboy magazine) That doesn`t need a reply, it`s self-evident. You can`t even get mad at it; it`s so insane that there`s just nothing to say about it. He would be, according to his point of view, someone not disposed to returning any of the colonial possessions in Africa or Asia to their rightful owners. He would be sharing a perspective with B.J. Vorster if he were in South Africa. He would be on the side of Ian Smith. He would have shot down Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), called him a rabble rouser. The only freedom fighters he would recognize would be those who were fighting Communists; if they were fighting to get out from under colonial rule, he`d call them terrorists. The Indians today he`d call agitators, terrorists, who knows? If John Wayne ran for President, he would get a great following ... I think he`s been enormously instrumental in perpetuating this view of the Indian as a savage, ferocious, destructive force. He`s made us believe things about the Indian that were never true and perpetuated the myth about how wonderful the frontiersmen were and how decent and honorable we all were.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of `cowards` perpetuating `senseless acts of violence` is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.

Now we`re getting a whole generation of kids who have never had a football team in L.A., so they don`t miss it and don`t ask for it. It becomes self-perpetuating. They don`t know what they`re missing.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!