Nina Bawden Quotes

Provocative... I used to be defensive about it, but in the end, I realised it's exactly right. It's what we're trying to do - to provoke thought and discussion and, you know, shake people up to start thinking about things in a different way. I'm interested in messing with what they think is the norm.

I like people who shake other people up and make them feel uncomfortable.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

We need the disruption of categories that lead us to abandon the difficult, the disagreeable, and the least likely to go very far.

I want to create a little chaos and make people's heads turn.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

You should live hoping you are going to offend people, because then you're doing something.

I view my job as being someone who is supposed to piss people off. I don't want to be just one-of-the-guys. I don't want to be just a smiling face you see on television presenting some vapid kind of easily-digestible garbage.

If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot.

I'm glad I've established this as my zone: 'the taboo breaker.'

I feel my role is to push boundaries. I don't like things to be safe and sedentary. So controversy is the cross I have to bear.

A famous man once said, 'A sure formula for failure is to try and please everyone.' Some might say I built a career on doing just the opposite of pleasing everyone.

I like to rattle cages.

Everything is offensive, so I'm enjoying the fact that I'm anti-kind. You've got to go out and just speak your mind. It needs to be heard.

If you're not ruffling feathers at CPAC, I don't think you're doing a very good job.

One of my favorite teachers is Osho, mainly because he liked to push people's buttons just to get them to think and live outside of their comfort zone.

Changing people's preconceptions is something you have to do in order to search for truth. Of course normally, that's not done because it also challenges social stability, and stories, as a result, are often told much more simply.

I prefer to create friction. Because if you're not pushing buttons, you're just making something pleasant; it's probably been done before, and it's not making anyone feel anything.

Well, 'Problematic' was the opposite of a show that was nostalgic and a light fluffy look at life. We were literally trying to kick a hornets' nest, and I don't know how effectively we did or didn't do that.

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

If not enough people doubt you, you're not making a difference.

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.