[The writer] mu…

The writer must offend people if he’s going to be effective. It’s like someone once said about opera. “Stab a tenor and he sings.” Stab a writer — or step on his toes — and he’ll write. It’s an automatic reflex reaction. A writer writes because it’s his response to the world. It’s a natural process, like respiration.

But above all, a writer must have a capacity for indignation. The capacity for indignation is the most important thing for a creative person. Not the aesthetic capacity but the capacity for indignation. And especially indignation at the treatment afforded other people… To see a blind and deaf baby and to feel anger, to feel fury, at the starving of children and the arrest of political dissidents. That is the basis of the writer.

Philip K. Dick

We write about what troubles us about the world.