There is no policy too sensitive to question, and no subject so taboo that you cannot even mention it
Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.
I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.
You'll never get me to speak religion. You'll never get me to speak politics.
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
We can't treat issues as taboo because we find them unpleasant.
I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that.
Do you think it's a good idea to be sarcastic about slavery?
We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.
When you are raised to believe that anything having to do with sex is forbidden and taboo, then of course that's all you want to know about. That becomes your complete and utter fascination. That is the surest way to interest a child.
I was very willing to take on controversial roles that people didn't really want to look at.
Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.
There's a couple things you don't talk about in life, and that's race, religion and politics. I try to make sure I don't talk about politics at all.
If you can't joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what's the point of jokes? What's the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.
You might as well learn about sex from Motley Crue than your parents because it's a lot more interesting.
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.
I've been quoting the book [on Peter Sutcliffe] constantly in rehearsals. Some members of the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written. Some of the women have expressed more - disgust and anger. What are they saying? They'd prefer not to know, not to understand? They'd prefer certain areas of life to be censored? Isn't that partly what breeds the Sutcliffes and the Nilsens?
I don't like jokes about sex or bodily functions or drug use or the difference between New York and L.A. I never do any of that.
There are things that you cannot talk to your mother and father about, there are things that you cannot talk to your children about.
Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.
I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.
In opposition to sex education: Let the kids today learn it where we did - in the gutter.
