Evan Osnos Quotes

If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.

… most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.

If printers (publishers) only printed that which everyone liked, there would be very little printed

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

If it were not for the fact that editors have become so timorous in these politically correct times, I would probably have a greater readership than I have.

They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

Today, my freedom as a poet is taken by a censor; tomorrow, my freedom as a citizen will be taken by a policeman. Today I am banished from the theater; tomorrow, I shall be banished from the land. Today, I am gagged; tomorrow, I shall be deported. Today a state of siege exists in literature; tomorrow, it will exist in the city.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

I'm deeply stressed as a filmmaker, and I know I'm not alone. The censorship crisis, the moral policing, the politics of it has most of us on edge. I'm scared to use certain words: like, if I use 'Bombay,' will there be a problem?

It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things.

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

Several times I drew a critical cartoon and then, at the last moment, stopped myself from putting it out in print. I thought it would be misunderstood, be a politically incorrect thing to do.

As a director and a creative person, I can say banning anything is wrong.

If the media spotlight affects my work or represses what I want to say in the future, then it is bad.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

I thought [books ban] was crazy. Really my thoughts were "This is America, we don't do this here" but of course I know a lot better now. And I wasn't the only one. Norma Klein was writing at the same time. Her books were going. So many of us. When you say to me, no you can't do this I say, oh yes I can.

Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.

To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius.

Such expression is impossible in a cramped atmosphere. As I have no desire to offer civil disobedience I cannot write freely. As the author of satyagraha I cannot, consistently with my profession, suppress the vital part of myself for the sake of being able to write on permissible subjects. ... It would be like dealing with the trunk without the head.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.