The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

‘Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation’

I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different, if they’re discontented.

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

Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.