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"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
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"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."

"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."

"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."

"To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"Books-they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions."
Explore more quotes by William O. Douglas


"One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment."


"The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized."


"The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government."


"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."


"The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions."


"No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment."


"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
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