The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we’ve done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore.

“I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win.”

I believe that people and books and newspapers are containers for ideas, but that burning the people who hold the ideas will be as unsuccessful as firebombing the newspaper archives. It is already too late. It is always too late. The ideas are already out, hiding behind people’s eyes, waiting in their thoughts. They can be whispered. They can be written on walls in the dead of night. They can be drawn.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.