Quotes About Prurience

At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation.

ALLEGORY IS STILL a contentious aspect of gay writing. To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is 'appropriation' or 'prurience'. Associating it with something in one's own love life is either 'conscripting a writer for the cause' (gay) or 'demonstrating its universal relevance' (straight).

He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.