Provocative Writing Quotes

I think some journalists and bloggers want their articles to be clever, and the way into that is by writing nasty things. I think our culture likes to be mean. I don't just find this in fashion - I find it in the news. More and more, it is about ripping people apart.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

I wrote an article for Revolver and it was very offensive.

I've been around long enough now that people who don't get into the outrageousness, the over-the-top stuff, they know not to buy my books anymore.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

And the stuff that I write, is even tougher than dykes.

There's always going to be controversy when you write the way I write.

I think writers are excited by stupidity and bad behavior, generally.

When I write I'll sometimes say things which are somewhat controversial - not because I'm seeking out controversy for its own sake, but if I don't have anything to say which is different, why am I bothering to write stuff down in the first place?

Anyone buying this book is going to be out a tidy sum if he is sucked in by the title. I wish I could write a real sexy book that would be barred from the mails. Apparently nothing whets a reader's appetite for literature more than the news that the author has been thrown into a federal pokey for disturbing the libido of millions of Americans.

I have a philosophy that everything you write doesn't have to be good for everybody. There are going to be people that get irritated by some of the things I write-including my parents. And then there are going to be people that you draw in because of the pointedness of certain things.

Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

I think that as I continue to write, my writing I hope will become more controversial and more provocative.

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other hand that.' You're getting paid for your opinion.

A little irreverence is always important to being a columnist. I try to do that.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

In my writing I wanted to be liked for writing really unlikeable stuff. There were books that people, particularly women, hated so much. They said, "I threw it against the wall!" Which, in my opinion, was a compliment. Because it's very hard to get somebody to throw something.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork . . . the truth.

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.