Life & Wisdom Quote by John Shirley

Shirley is taking a swing at the cultural bureaucracy that turns art into a set of shelf-friendly tags. “Labels only confuse people” is less a plea for purity than a dig at how categories often replace attention: once something is stamped “cyberpunk” or “horror” or “literary,” audiences and gatekeepers stop reading and start sorting. He flatters “the smarter people,” sure, but it’s a calculated provocation that draws a line between curious readers and status-minded consumers who treat genre as either a guilty pleasure or a stain.

The subtext is especially pointed given Shirley’s own career orbiting punk-inflected sci-fi and horror: he knows that labels can be both trap and lifeline. Genres are marketing machinery, but they’re also communities with shared codes. His move is to treat genre as a costume, not an identity. “Ostensibly” matters: he’s willing to appear compliant with category expectations while smuggling in off-label ambition, politics, formal weirdness.

Then he pivots to craft ethics: “I always try to entertain.” That’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-pretension. He rejects the idea that seriousness must be austere, that difficulty is the only badge of artistic merit. The final line lands like a shrug with teeth: if the ticket to reach people is to work inside a genre box, he’ll do it, but on his terms. Entertainment isn’t the opposite of art here; it’s the delivery system.