truth Quotes

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

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.