Quotes About Society

To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

I was training to be a lawyer... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.

A writer just speaks from his heart, mind and soul. They are the conscience keepers of the society. They are the keepers of the soul of the society.

Why does 'writer' have no gender, but 'actor' has a gender? What is that?

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Abdias do Nascimento was the first writer who gave me racial consciousness. It was through his books and writings that I first took in the real weight of race in our society. He was the main influence on me because in my family, race was never an issue.

A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, text messages; they all think they're James Cameron's Avatar, performing in some video game for which they make up the script.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

Men were beasts. Everyone knew that.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments, said Frex.

She added, perhaps to herself, You have to become old and ugly before anyone listens to you, and then they don't, because you're ugly and old.

in a people whose moral code is so lax, so little is wrong.