Thought Provocation Quotes

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.

This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.

An apt aphorism half kills, half immortalizes.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

People say Wu-Tang makes you think too much. What's wrong with thinking?

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.

So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.

I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.

Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.

As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.

I wanted to make a redemptive thriller that didn't end with some kind of big, crazy shootout and blood spill, but more of a collision of ideas and a discussion of ethics.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

What really excites me is the prospect of making people actually enjoy thinking about difficult topics, to laugh even while seriously engaging these very unpleasant subjects.

Modeling, for me, isn't about being beautiful but creating something interesting for people to look at and think about.

I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

What sort of person you grow into should not be achieved by default, and often that's exactly what happens to kids. I see literature as a method of guidance, information, and contemplation, and consider it the greatest compliment possible when a reader tells me that a book of mine really made him/her think.

One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.

The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn't really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.