“I discovered long ago that, if you write a book about cats or dogs, everybody loves you, but if you dare to write a book about human beings, all hell breaks loose. It is impossible to write an uncensored, honest book about human behaviour without offending at least part of your audience. If you feel you have a basic truth to tell, then you must tell it and be prepared to suffer the inevitable criticisms.”
Desmond Morris in: "The Dan Schneider Interview 8: Desmond Morris" at cosmoetica.com, first posted 2/16/08.
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Desmond Morris 14
English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter 1928Related quotes

“Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.”
Source: The Fortune Teller

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“Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books”
"A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut. Jr." by Robert Scholes in The Vonnegut Statement (1973) edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer October 1966), later published in Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut (1988), p. 123
Various interviews
Context: Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books … why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with … humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.

Source: The Funny Thing Is...

“I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn.”
Interview at Achuka Children's Books
Context: I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? Well, there are a few fantasies that are. One of them is Paradise Lost.

“If you write, you should write about the truth.”
The War for America's Soul, ISBN 978-1-62157-940-3