Censored Literature Quotes

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom.

The political parties use religion for their own interests and whenever they find any criticism about religion, they can't tolerate it, so they ban the book.

I am not in the business of suppressing books.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

[T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul.

If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free..

Having a book censored means something. It means you have deeply offended one or more people who felt they needed to protect unsuspecting readers from your inflammatory words, thoughts, and images.

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

Censorship has had a long history in the western world. Book banning is as old as books.

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

While the debate over banned books usually seems to happen just outside the gates of government, it takes on a new danger and urgency when legislators get involved. Their actions cause voices to be silenced both inside and outside the books. That's un-American.

'The Catcher in the Rye' was targeted by some schools as a book too risque to read and certainly not appropriate for young minds. My parents certainly would not have approved of the book, but I secretly read it when I was in 7th grade. I felt so rebellious, and my young mind loved it.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Well, "disgusting" doesn't refer to the books but to the subjective reaction of the person making the complaint. I don't think that anything is disgusting per se. These words "disgusting" and "filthy," etc., have prevented us from undertaking any scientific experimentation in sexual matters.

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.