Having a book censored means something. It means you have deeply offended one or more people who felt they needed to protect unsuspecting readers from your inflammatory words, thoughts, and images.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.
To be censored is one sure way of knowing you have been taken dead seriously. It also speaks to the continuing power of the printed word, almost fifteen hundred years after that amazing invention.
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
I try not to censor myself at all.
Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
The prime goal of censorship is to promote ignorance, whether it is done via lying and bowdlerized school texts or by attacking individual books.
I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.