"The responsibility of the writer is to put into words what everyone knows is true. And sadly, truly,..."

“The responsibility of the writer is to put into words what everyone knows is true. And sadly, truly, most of those things have usually been left unsaid. When Henry Miller was writing Tropic of Cancer, for example, the word out on the boulevards in Paris was that he was putting into the book all the things other writers had left out of their own novels. In the end what he wrote wasn’t surprising in itself—most intelligent people know that stuff. What was shocking was that he dared to put it out on the marketplace where it became a part of the common culture and couldn’t be ignored. The same I feel is true when Alexander Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Most thinking people in Russia knew about the gulags. What they didn’t have from first- or secondhand knowledge, they knew from their dreams and nightmares: their imagination filled in the rest. Solzhenitsyn added some specific details, obviously, but the main thing he did was to put the experience of the gulag out on the chopping block where everyone could see it, where the full shame became a part of public discourse.”

- Peter von Ziegesar (via mttbll)