Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernardo Bertolucci

There is a hard-earned impatience in Bertolucci's phrasing: "still against" signals a position tested by scandal, not a youthful slogan kept in a drawer. Coming from a director whose work repeatedly collided with public anxiety about sex, politics, and power, the line reads like a refusal to let institutions tidy up the messiness his films insist on showing. He doesn't argue policy; he plants a flag in biography. "A subject in my life" quietly shifts the debate from abstract morality to lived consequence: censorship isn't just a civic question, it's a force that shapes what an artist is allowed to become.

The intent is defensive but not apologetic. Bertolucci is staking out the director's prerogative to provoke and to risk offense, a posture that made sense in postwar Italy where Catholic authority, state regulation, and party politics all competed to police culture. His cinema, from the openly political to the explicitly erotic, depended on the idea that adults could confront uncomfortable material without a guardian stepping in.

The subtext is also strategic. By framing censorship as "very important" to his life, he places himself in a lineage of embattled artists and intellectuals, where suppression becomes proof of seriousness. It's a moral claim, but it's also a power move: if censorship is the true villain, then the director is not merely a maker of controversial images, but a witness to society's fear of them. That "still" insists the fight never ends, because the impulse to ban simply changes costumes.