Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business. There are people who turn out unicorns by the yard. Capitalism flourishes in Elfland.

Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind.

They are so much alike that I am often uncertain whether I’m responding ethically or aesthetically. “That’s right: that’s wrong.” Such spontaneous certainty seems shallow, but it is not: it is deep and deeply irrational, rising from old, tangled, multitudinous roots, reaching down to the depths of me. As soon as I try to justify it, to find its rea

A poem or story consciously written to address a problem or bring about a specific result, no matter how powerful or beneficent, has abdicated its first duty and privilege, its responsibility to itself. Its primary job is simply to find the words that give it its right, true shape. That shape is its beauty and its truth.

If we assume that imagination has no connection with reality but is mere escapism, and therefore distrust it and suppress it, it will be crippled, perverted, it will fall silent or speak untruth. The imagination, like any basic human capacity, needs exercise, discipline, training, in childhood and lifelong.

But there’s a moral reason too. What my reader gets out of my pot is what she needs, and she knows her needs better than I do. My only wisdom is knowing how to make pots. Who am I to preach?

And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” And again, those representations, those imaginations, can be true ones, or false. They can be the insights and foresights that make human life possible, or the d

Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we

Language is “for” communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song. The writer has to listen. The reader has to hear. Pleasure in articulate sound, and in the symbolic use of it, i

To be friends with the animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it.