"If you don't know criminals, you know nothing about crime. If you know nothing about the mentality of the police, and the way they set about keeping what the state has designated as order, you know nothing about the police. If you have never had the uneasy feeling that you are capable of acting like a monster, then you can never describe, from inside, either monstrous values, pleasures or agonies. If by a lucky accident you have never had directly do with any of it, then for God's sake leave this work alone."
"...I got a certain pleasure out of repeatedly kicking the
establishment's bottom. It's sure too, that unless you have experienced that mood, there's no chance of your understanding the more intelligent deviator's mind, and I do wish certain writers wouldn't try. They ought to do some basic training, take a few risks, spend a night being grilled by the law, bounce a few big cheques on the kind of operator that doesn't appreciate rubber, talk back to someone in a bar where nobody knows them, get done for something non-violent that the law really hates, like a bit of long-firming, make Mummy burst into tears, and generally get their knees brown."
Derek Raymond, The Hidden Files, Little Brown & Company 1992.
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