Andrew Vachss Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

The worst place to be is in the middle. When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

Andrew Vachss
The Bowery station on the J line is what happens to a neighborhood once politicians realize the people who live there don't vote.

Andrew Vachss
Two rules: You enter without breaking. And you remember that nobody misses what you don't take.

Andrew Vachss
If love would die along with death, this life wouldn't be so hard.

Andrew Vachss
A dog is like a person—he needs a job and a family to be what he's meant to be.

Andrew Vachss
Everything that's in [my] books comes out of what I've seen, or touched, or felt, or smelt, and if I had one wish it would be that the books were fiction.

Andrew Vachss
My position on pornography is quite simple. You can argue about Penthouse or Playboy or things of that ilk. But child pornography, a picture of a child engaged in a sexual act, is a photograph of a crime and you cannot argue about that. It is, per se, illegal, illicit and immoral. It is unfortunate that my work is taken up by people with whom I am not allied.

Andrew Vachss
I don't love kids. I hate their predators. It's a burning hatred I feel to this day.

Andrew Vachss
It's an extremely profitable thing to be 'concerned' about drugs. You don't just have treatment programs, you have law enforcement programs, you have entire industries that could not function but for drugs. Including the prison industry. I think America has gone psychotic... there are human beings—even as we speak—dying, in the kind of shrieking, tormenting pain you couldn't inflict on a P.O.W., because America doesn't want them to be drug addicts.

Andrew Vachss
Can you be noble as you practice violence, extortion, blackmail, even mass murder? The struggle to be free from oppression is, in my mind, per se noble. But noble causes attract a wide range of participants, and many would fall far short of nobility

Andrew Vachss
In his autobiography, former President Bill Clinton credits [Andrew] Vachss with [writing the National Child Protection Act] and notes how important it was to him and wife Hillary. But there's a catch, according to Vachss: 'It's never been funded.'

Andrew Vachss
If a train is coming at you, closing your eyes won't save you... but if you look right at it, you at least have a chance to jump.

Andrew Vachss
I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.

Andrew Vachss
Journalism is the one thing that protects us. There's a history of crusading, let–the–chips–fall–where–they–may journalists. But that's given way to 'advocacy journalists,' who have left– or right–wing biases. That doesn't make sense. The only thing a journalist should worship is the truth.

Andrew Vachss
From the very second that two people sat together around a fire in the forest, there was another human out there who felt better in the dark.

Andrew Vachss
He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

Andrew Vachss
I don't believe this country will ever come to grips with child abuse until they make the obvious, simple connection between today's victim and tomorrow's predator. As long as they believe a Ted Bundy or a John Wayne Gacy is a biogenetic mistake as opposed to a beast that was built and a monster that was made, they'll continue to blithely walk around, saying, 'I'm against child abuse.'"

Andrew Vachss
We don't distinguish between the various forms of child abuse. Emotional abuse... is pretty much ignored. When someone spends their life being told, 'You're stupid, you're a disgrace, I should have aborted you, you ruined my life,' it scars them in ways that are almost impossible to describe with words. And yet, such a person describing their life would be told, 'Oh, you weren't an incest victim? Oh, you weren't burned with cigarettes? So, how abused were you really?

Andrew Vachss
Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.

Andrew Vachss
My goal was not to raise consciousness, but to raise anger. Ours is a country where anything can be accomplished if enough people get angry... because, in America, we act on our collective anger. If you want proof of how that works, just take a look at how New York State finally closed the hated (and virtually unknown) 'incest exception.

Andrew Vachss
When someone asks me, 'Why do you write comics?' I tell them, for the same reason I write editorials, essays, and articles; the same reason I give speeches; the same reason I appear on TV programs, and give interviews. Same message; different forum. There is no universal forum, so the more outreach we can do, the better the chance of forming coalitions.

Andrew Vachss
People who don't have much get ugly about giving up the little they have left.

Andrew Vachss
I promise you, there are people in America whose only problem with the Taliban is that they did it for the wrong god. Whether it's incest, rape, terrorism or Nazism, it's all the same thing—accumulating and abusing power.

Andrew Vachss
Our reasons for critiquing the [child protection] system [are] pointless. To analyze the system and point out what's wrong with it, without the power to alter it, is masturbatory. The whole concept behind analysis is the concept behind consciousness–raising. Which is, if I show you that something is terrible, you will do something about it. That's not reality. Reality is, it's about power. It's not about education, and knowledge is not power.

Andrew Vachss
Anybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument."

Andrew Vachss
If you look at Burke closely, you'll see the prototypical abused child: hypervigilant, distrustful. He's so committed to his family of choice—not his DNA-biological family, which tortured him, or the state which raised him, but the family that he chose—that homicide is a natural consequence of injuring any of that family. He's not a hit man. But he shares the same religion I do, which is revenge.

Andrew Vachss
The child most at risk [to be accessed by a predatory pedophile] is the child not bonded deeply to anything or anybody. Children who are most deeply bonded with parents, parents who are protective, it's almost like, I don't know if you've seen predatory animals that put a kind of smell on their young to protect them? Okay? I think your 'luck' was much more likely due to your parent[s] than it was to any blind confluence of the planets.

Andrew Vachss
Plenty of states, like Florida, still don't have [law guardians]. What does that tell you? Because with non-attorney guardians there's no attorney-client privilege. There's no ability to cross–examine witnesses, to subpoena evidence, to appeal. Basically you serve completely at the pleasure of the judge. And if you don't please the judge, you're history. What more of a message do kids need?"

Andrew Vachss