Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.
About This Quote
About Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison was a 20th-century American writer. Dorothy Earlene Allison was an American writer whose writing focused on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism, and lesbianism. She was a self-identified femme lesbian. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Fear — Understanding and overcoming the anxieties that hold us back