Art & Creativity Quote by Robertson Davies

There is a polite trap hidden in Davies's sentence: if you want to suppress a book, you are admitting you do not belong to the club of the truly literate. The line looks like a calm observation, but it is a scalpel. Davies frames censorship not as a moral stance but as a symptom of incuriosity, a tell that someone treats reading as a badge rather than a practice. "Really" does the heavy lifting twice, tightening the definition of literacy from mere decoding into an ethic: sustained attention, tolerance for contradiction, a willingness to be changed by what you read.

The subtext is a quiet inversion of the censor's self-image. Suppressors often present themselves as guardians of culture, protecting minds from corruption. Davies suggests the opposite: the book-lover's instinct is expansion, not quarantine. A person who has lived with literature knows that the discomforting, the ugly, the wrongheaded, even the offensive are part of the ecosystem; you learn by arguing with them, not erasing them. Underneath is a novelist's faith in the reader as an active agent, capable of discernment, capable of refusing a text without forbidding it.

Context matters: Davies wrote in a century that repeatedly tested liberal confidence in open expression - from totalitarian propaganda to mid-century obscenity trials to local moral panics about what "shouldn't" be on shelves. His claim isn't that all books are good; it's that the impulse to ban is rarely literary. It's administrative, anxious, and allergic to complexity.