The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

The miracle of prose is this: it begins with the words. What we, as authors, give to the reader isn’t the story. We don’t give them the people or the places or the emotions. What we give the reader is a raw code, a rough pattern, loose architectural plans that they use to build the book themselves. No two readers can or will ever read the same book

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

The best of Poe doesn’t date.

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.

Wells described the art of the short story as ‘the jolly art of making something very bright and moving; it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention and imagination and the mood ca

Reflections, a book of essays and non-fiction by Diana Wynne Jones.

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.

James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

This was the introduction to Terry Pratchett’s non-fiction collection, A Slip of the Keyboard, 2014.