The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

I fled, or at least, backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up. I did not want to be nailed to the truth; or to be more accurate, 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.

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

Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

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.

I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile too.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.

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

We need libraries. We need books. We need literate citizens.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure Leave no path untaken.

It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

Kids censor their own reading, and dullness is the ultimate deterrent.

you do not come to authors for answers. You come to us for questions. We’re really good at questions.

“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “for something that I would do for free.”

“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things.

them

Once upon a time, back when animals spoke and rivers sang and every quest was worth going on, back when dragons still roared and maidens were beautiful and an honest young man with a good heart and a great deal of luck could always wind up with a princess and half the kingdom—back then, fairy tales were for adults.

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.

If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.

I hope you’ll make mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

Whisky and sugar careening through my system, I defy the orders on my ticket not to photograph anything, and I Twitter a picture of the bar menu.