"About the same time, Robert Redford made a good film called Three Days of the Condor, and that was about the turning point, I think. Certainly Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Eddie Robinson, played monstrously bad men, but they get killed in the end." - Charlton Heston
"And their pals vote for their stuff when they're not on the panel, and it just keeps going that way. And they tend to be very fringe artists, so anything before the 20th century is not worth considering. This is out of date." - Charlton Heston
"As an artist, I understand that, and I value the creative input of the artist." - Charlton Heston
"Clergymen tend to be unreliable and pompous figures. Seldom Jewish rabbis, less often Catholic priests, but Protestant ministers tend to be... not really very admirable. Not necessarily evil, but silly. And wrong, of course." - Charlton Heston
"Dirty Harry, for example. Clint Eastwood was not a rogue cop. He was a maverick cop, but he was a good guy." - Charlton Heston
"For the council which in theory has to approve a grant has too heavy a workload." - Charlton Heston
"I've said to several chairmen of the NEA: "If you annoy a certain number of taxpayers, their representatives will not give you any money. You must, must, must prevent these grants."" - Charlton Heston
"In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president." - Charlton Heston
"It is an odd dilemma. On the one hand, film is the art form of the 20th century, undeniably... As Lenin said, "the most powerful tool ever invented to influence the mind of man."" - Charlton Heston
"Now what Tarantino will say to that is "Don't you understand? This is a black comedy. We're holding this up to ridicule." There's no worse thing you can accuse a cool person of being than not getting a joke." - Charlton Heston
"Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end." - Charlton Heston
"Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories." - Charlton Heston
"The big studio era is from the coming of sound until 1950, until I came in... I came in at a crux in film, which was the end of the studio era and the rise of filmmaking." - Charlton Heston
"The problem is what they call the peer review panel, which are in fact, panels of some artists, arts activists, people that donate money and support, arts administrators executives, directors, and sub-directors, and so on." - Charlton Heston
"Then I was involved in some of the flops on the Mapplethorpe and Serrano thing, and the AIDS activist last spring who sprinkled his blood." - Charlton Heston
"These are ridiculous, foolish grants dangerously foolish. Most of which are made precisely to irritate the Philistine." - Charlton Heston
"To the world, you are America." - Charlton Heston
"Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely." - Charlton Heston
"We see paintings of the flood, and so forth... the destruction of the Golden Calf. But those too came out satisfactorily in the end... the Lord sets his rainbow in the sky and says, "Never again will I cause a flood to come upon the earth."" - Charlton Heston
"Well, we have certainly produced great art before we did this. In my view, there are any number of areas of government which tax money should not be spent." - Charlton Heston
"You could think of extraordinary examples to the contrary: The Grapes of Wrath... and even into the 70s." - Charlton Heston
"You cut their money back, for one thing... . I go back a long way with the NEA." - Charlton Heston
