I just read a quote from Don DeLillo that really touched a nerve. He was responding to criticism from George Will about his novel Libra, a portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald. The ultra-conservative Will asserted that the novel was “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship." DeLillo responded:

Being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.
Here's to my first novel, and the ones that follow it, making me a "bad citizen."