A Quote by Jessica Mitford
the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
Related Quotes
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them.... If they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck their power of usefulness is gone.
None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.
The best definition I've heard is that guilt is about what you've done, shame is about who you are. If something's out of my control, I don't feel shame about it, because what could I have done? If you're guilty, you can at least try to atone for it or make it better or not do it again. If it's who you are, you can't do much about it except change yourself, and that's pretty hard.
Did I try to embarrass other people? Now if it's about other people, guilty guilty guilty guilty.
I got a pit bull from a shelter, so my whole life is centered on this dog, and I've been writing a lot of dog jokes. I should probably give up now, because I'm writing jokes about my dog.
In novels like 'Kaaterskill Falls', I've been able to write sympathetically about religious people - and beyond that, I've been able to take a religious point of view - because belief does not anger or embarrass me.
I think there are brilliant jokes to be made about abortion, and we should be able to talk about this in the way that we make jokes about death - you should be able to make jokes about everything.
I would like to write a novel, or at least try to write one, although my motives are not entirely pure. For one thing, I get asked about writing novels so much that I feel guilty about never having written one. And although I have no strong desire to write a novel, I would hate not to try. That would just be silly. On the other hand, I hate the idea of slogging through something that turns out to be not good.
I have my writing therapy. For me, writing and friends therapy is an internal journey where you go in deep, you reflect, you try to heal your inner child. But as an activist, there's the outward, going wide therapy, where you get to realize at a certain point that talking about yourself gets boring. And it's also unhealthy to be so much into yourself. At some point, you have got to be able to look at the issue and say, "It's not about you. It's about a culture, a people, a nation, a family."
I have sat with the mothers who have lost addicted sons. I have sat with families of kids who have been killed in drug-related gang violence. I have been to the prisons. I have seen the effects. At some point in time, I felt I had to do something other than write a novel about it, that I needed to try to make some sort of contribution, at least try to make some sort of difference in the real world.
I make comedies and I always try... I don't try but I allow to have at least 5% of the jokes or have some jokes that I know will be understood by only about 5% of the audience. It's that guy in the corner who gets it and laughs. But he has to have his jokes too. That's part of my audience. Part of my audience is the people who will only get certain things.
One of the joys about my job is that I've been able to constantly move and keep changing. The whole point of being an actor is you change your exterior everytime you do a new job and that's what keeps it exciting.
The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
Our country is miserably off track; this is something that all but the far left agree on. I personally came to the point where I felt a responsibility to try to do something about it, and I've been blessed enough in business to be able to take a shot at running for office.
I get a little myopic in the act of doing any writing. I think I'm not as interested or not as able to write about balance, because I think there's something I want to try to get at. I'm trying to get at something about the experience of growing up or about families.
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