“I think it’s the shock of every writer’s life when their first book is published. The shock of their lives. One has somehow to adjust from being anonymous, a figure in ambush, working from concealment, to being and working in full public view.”

— Ted Hughes

The Paris Review interview
Context: I think it’s the shock of every writer’s life when their first book is published. The shock of their lives. One has somehow to adjust from being anonymous, a figure in ambush, working from concealment, to being and working in full public view. It had an enormous effect on me. My impression was that I had suddenly walked into a wall of heavy hostile fire. <!-- That first year I wrote verses with three magical assonances to the line with the intention of abolishing certain critics! Now I read those reviews and they seem quite good. So it was writer’s paranoia. The shock to a person who’s never been named in public of being mentioned in newspapers can be absolutely traumatic. To everybody else it looks fairly harmless, even enviable. What I can see was that it enormously accelerated my determination to bring my whole operation into my own terms, to make my own form of writing and to abandon a lot of more casual paths that I might have followed. If I’d remained completely unknown, a writer not commented on, I think I might have gone off in all kinds of other directions. One can never be sure, of course.

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Ted Hughes 55

English poet and children's writer 1930–1998

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.”

Stendhal (1783–1842) French writer

Fragments
De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

“From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, "He only wrote that to shock." I smile and nod. Precisely.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Quoted by Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre (1981)
Context: I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, "He only wrote that to shock." I smile and nod. Precisely.

“I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

“I was brought up to believe that human beings are good, which is why it shocks me to the core when I see human beings behaving badly.”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

“While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

alt.fan.pratchett (1 December 1998) http://www.lspace.org/fandom/afp/timelines/discussions/is-pterry-going-downhill.html
Usenet

“So that's my home town, and I come from a perfectly ordinary working-class family; and in fact, I didn't really meet middle-class people until I went to university. It was quite a shock, really. People were saying things like 'Well, I was always going to end up doing English, because I was brought up surrounded by books - brought up in a house full of books'; and I'd think 'Yes, so was I; but they were full of Green Shield stamps.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

I suppose we could have swapped them for books, but we had our eye on a twin-tub.
Stand-up

“I have a need to create works that are not just shocking, or say: striking, smashing – but also such works that can become companions of my various life events, and become companions of other people in their situations. These are the works that I create from the deep need to communicate with my sense and my ideal of beauty.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

There is no threat. Weapons and colour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqfjr78Pyfs, video, Galeria Olympia, 23 November 2017 (in Polish)

“The first time I saw a picture of Elvis - I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Helmut Sorge, Los Angeles, 2006

“When you’re confronted with your community being rendered invisible to the culture-at-large, a mission as straightforward as nurturing and promoting your community’s storytellers can, in my view, be viewed as a form of activism. Another, if one works in a context like mine, is exposing one’s students to the work of your community’s poets and writers…”

Francisco Aragón (1968) poet

On how poetry can become a form of activism in “Split This Rock Interviews Freedom Plow Finalist Francisco Aragón” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/04/split-this-rock-interviews-freedom-plow-finalist-francisco-aragon in Poetry Foundation (Apr 2017)

“I think it’s the shock of every writer’s life when their first book is published. The shock of their lives. One has somehow to adjust from being anonymous, a figure in ambush, working from concealment, to being and working in full public view.”

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