Playboy interview (1996)
Context: I foresaw political correctness 43 years ago. … whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I'd combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. … I say to both bunches, Whether you're a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them. All this political correctness that's rampant on campuses is B. S. You can't fool around with the dangerous notion of telling a university what to teach and what not to.
“They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.”
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
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Martin Amis 136
Welsh novelist 1949Related quotes
“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.”
“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 211
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
In Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998, edited by Sita Ram Goel) ISBN 81-85990-55-7
1990s
“I've had enough of the Quran in The Netherlands: ban that fascist book.”
Geert Wilders, De Volkskrant (8 August 2007)
2010s, Marked for Death (2012)
Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
1930s
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
Context: In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion. Also the sense, as Motion invokes his like-minded contemporaries, that Larkin is being judged by a newer, cleaner, braver, saner world. … Motion is extremely irritated by Larkin's extreme irritability. He's always complaining that Larkin is always complaining.
The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)