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I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.
We're all living blinkered lives, and we're not seeing what's going on and looking to change it. I'm not saying that everyone has to make a political statement, but we need to be more aware of what's happening and why.
It's not what my job is about. I'm not out to make a political statement. I want to stand for something, but more by example.
I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.
The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement.
My choosing Islam was not a political statement; it was a spiritual statement.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better.
Certainly, the murder of civilians for political statement did not just begin on September 11, 2001.
I feel so Scottish when I go abroad, and I'm so proud of it, but for me, it's not a political statement - I just happen to be Scottish.