Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

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.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.

I decided to make one of the most controversial songs that I could. I want to get under people's skin.

Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.

Historically, science-fiction and fantasy literature is no stranger to controversy, but it has learned how to adapt and endure.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.

What I love about comedians is their instinct is always to go against the grain. Their whole existence is pointing out the elephant in the room. Already you can see audiences are pushing back, but we're the ones who really can take it more than anybody.

I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions.

When people started reading me and talking to me about the work, they didn't say how funny, or how satiric, or how brilliant, or how this or how that, they said, how'd you get away with it? How'd you get that into print?

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.

Even if people hate my other movies, and hate me, or whatever, I think from this point of view, Postal is the most important movie after September 11. It's not respecting any edge, any border, any nation, any religion - it's an all-type offender. I think that only if everybody gets a little pissed about something then you will start thinking about your situation.

I'd heard that Lenny Bruce used a lot of profanity and obscenities in his act, and I was curious.

Consumerism is our national religion.

If you make a movie of the present day culture, in the future it'll be a horror film.

My film is intentionally political. And I think that's really the issue.

Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.

There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.

in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.

Hip-Hop is Dead cause America is dead culturally.

Ridicule is the deadliest weapon of the age.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.