The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and e-mail, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; they tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.

Books were very, very banned, and she was given a copy of Gone with the Wind. And each night she would draw the curtains and put the blackout in place and read, with a tiny light, two or three chapters, losing valuable sleep time, so that the next morning when the kids came in she could tell them the story of what she read, and that was all they wanted. And for an hour every day they got away. They got out of the Radomsko ghetto. Most of those kids went on to the camps. She says that she tracked them all later and discovered that four – out of the dozens of kids she taught – had survived.

It has a working title of American Gods (which is not what the book will be called, but what it is about).

Children are a relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them.

Big is not necessarily bad. Small is not necessarily good.

Learn how to say no.

Get it in writing. Or put it in writing.

Everything is negotiable.

Trust your obsessions.

Don’t stop learning.

Be you. Don’t try to be someone else more commercial. Don’t try to be that other guy.

I’ve learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

‘This is really great. You should enjoy it.’

I wish you luck. Luck is useful.

We’re in a transitional world right now, if you’re in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I’ve talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.