'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.'
Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Manners & Mystery, p.34.
