The truth is that those who join gangs – more often than not they are young men in their later teens – often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad – so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed – that they’re actually rather good.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein are clearly deplorable. No matter how many great films he‘s bullied into production, or his guilt-induced contributions to left-minded ideals, this kind of intimidation and abuse of power is perverse and utterly unforgivable. Period.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

That’s the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain – they cannot be otherwise.

Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.

To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London – those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport – is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy.

Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

Someone at Hollywood Records said, ‘Are you into Alanis Morissette?’ I said ‘Yeah, she sells 26 million albums, of course. It would be perverse if she works with me, but I don’t think you can get her.’ A week later they say she’s coming down the studio.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

In science, ‘fact‘ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn’t want to go down that route.

Around the nation, lawmakers have drawn up their districts with such perverse precision and aversion to competition, that legislators rarely face competitive challenges.

The perverse gift of the Chinese coronavirus is that it has given Americans an up close and personal look at the horrors of big government – and, by extension, socialism.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

Anything that was perverse and silly would be Kids in the Hall.

Our electoral process has created perverse incentives that have warped our democracy and empowered special interests and a vocal minority.

Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it’s safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.

The supply-side effect of a restrictive monetary policy is likely to be perverse, in that high interest rates enter into costs and thus exert inflationary pressure.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.

A risk-insensitive leverage ratio can be a useful backstop to risk-based capital requirements. But such a ratio can have perverse incentives if it is the binding capital requirement because it treats relatively safe activities, such as central clearing, as equivalent to the most risky activities.

I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they’ll run the other way.

Being an actor somehow can be a perverse extension of that feeling we generally all have as children, that feeling of wanting to please. Of course you’re looking for affirmation, encouragement.

When you create an economy where you subsidize corporate profits through a welfare program and food stamps in order to keep wages low in some perverse pursuit of ‘competiveness,’ than you reap the fruits of the anger that you sow.

Self-control is needed in the age of technology. Folks have to apply their sense in reacting to different things. I don’t appreciate perverse and venom-spewing mindset.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.

I have a perverse attraction to risk. Not physical risk but emotional, financial risk – anything than can’t kill you immediately.

You can’t really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you’re accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you’re labelled willful and perverse.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

Language is very important. If you are condoning acts of terror… you are giving credibility to a view that is perverse and is wrong.

It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.

As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that’s eccentric, it’s totally acceptable – not only that, it’s lauded in some perverse way.

Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I tend to have this perverse reaction to authority and stress: I become more confident and clear when a challenge is enormous.

Our career path has tended to be the most perverse and contrary approach to the entertainment industry imaginable, while at the same time doing the kinds of things that you have to do, the videos, the photos and all that sort of stuff.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.