Quotes from David Hajdu

Bob] Dylan said, "I don't have to B.S. anybody like those guys up on Broadway that're always writin' about 'I'm hot for you and you're hot for me--ooka dooka dicka dee.' There's other things in the world besides love and sex that're important too. People shouldn't turn their backs on 'em just because they ain't pretty to look at. How is the world ever gonna get any better if we're afraid to look at these things.

It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible." Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.

The history of censorship in twentieth-century America is largely a story of self-regulation in the name of self-preservation—voluntary restraint enacted on the assumption that governmental restriction would be worse.

It was the strangest thing to me that Charlie Gaines was publishing all these Bible stories about love and kindness," said Klapper, "and he was the nastiest son of a bitch on the face of the earth.

It is poppycock to think that it is necessary to resort to laws to make America greater by banning comic books... This is a matter for the home, the school, the church, and other family influences - not the legislatures.

When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.