Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Connelly

Connelly is staking out a novelist's right to trespass. By calling boundaries "individual and personal", he shifts the debate away from public permission slips and toward private ethics: what can I live with putting on the page, and can I do it without lying? It's a defensive move, but not a meek one. He isn't asking whether 9/11 is "too soon" or "off limits"; he's rejecting the premise that any cultural trauma can be quarantined from art by default.

The phrase "including the twin towers" is doing careful work. He chooses the metonym that carries maximum visual charge, not "terrorism" or "the attacks". That signals awareness of the event's iconography and the way it functions as a shorthand for grief, fear, and national narrative. Yet he immediately grounds it in craft rather than spectacle: "small references". Subtext: the responsible use of catastrophe is often oblique. In crime fiction especially, the world arrives as background pressure - a headline on the radio, a change in security culture, an ambient suspicion that reshapes a city. Connelly implies that integrating 9/11 isn't a bid for emotional clout; it's an acknowledgment that characters cannot plausibly inhabit a post-2001 America while pretending the rupture didn't happen.

Context matters here: Connelly writes procedural realism. His readers expect Los Angeles to feel like the real LA, with institutions, anxieties, and moral weather that reflect the time. The intent is to protect that realism from a new kind of censorship - not the state, but the crowd's demand for sanctified silence.