The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore.

I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

(Also do not do what this author did when his eleven-year-old daughter was into R. L. Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying, “If you liked those you’ll love this!” Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her early teenage years, and still glares at me whenever Stephen King’s name is mentioned.)

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.