James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

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

There are too many books out there. So you want to make it easier on the people shelving them and on the people looking for them by limiting the places they’re going to go looking for books. You give them places not to look. That’s the simplicity of book shelving in bookstores. It tells you what not to read.

Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

I do not care – I do not believe it matters – whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The content is the important thing.

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

A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love.

With Hiding the Elephant Steinmeyer took the public on a journey through the history of theatrical magic. Art and Artifice

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