The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

I love the author or the book in question, and I hope my love will be contagious.

The idea that writers could enjoy books, sometimes even be influenced by them, and point other people at the works that they had loved, seemed to me to make absolute sense. 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.

You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

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

Without our stories we are incomplete.

What is important is to tell the stories anew, and to retell the old stories. They are our stories, and they should be told.

(Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton* once pointed out, are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

We behave differently when we see the darkness looming. We become creatures of lust and fear.