The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
Writing a book is not a crime.
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.