Quote of the Week

I write fantasies, but draw from the world I see. If that sometimes hurts, it’s because the truth usually does. John Steinbeck was accused of gratuitous ugliness when he wrote about the migration of the Okies to California in The Grapes of Wrath, even of trying to foment a domestic revolution, but most of his accusers -- like those who made similar accusations against Upton Sinclair when he wrote about the corrupt putrescence of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle -- were people who preferred fairy-tales and happily-ever-afters. Sometimes the truth of how we live is just ugly, that’s all. But to turn aside from these truths out of some perceived delicacy, or to give in to the idea that writing about violence causes violence, is to embrace hypocrisy. In Washington, hypocrisy breeds politicians. In the arts, it breeds pornography.
--Stephen King, speech at the 1999 Vermont Library Conference