Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

I have more trust in my Inner Teacher. She is subtle and humble because she hopes to be understood. She contains contradictory opinions without getting indigestion. She can mediate between the arrogant artist self who mutters, “I don’t give a damn if you don’t understand me,” and the preacher self who shouts, “Now hear this!” She doesn’t declare tr

and that direction is towards the reinclusion of fantasy as an essential element of fiction. Or put it this way: fiction—writing it, reading it—is an act of the imagination.

To describe society since the mid twentieth century—global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked—we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

For most of human history, most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself.

Everybody knows utopias are to be read not as novels but as blueprints for social theory or practice.

This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

We’re social animals, but we crave solitude to make our souls. Americans cherish their opinions at least as much as their souls, and opinions allowed to take root where nobody’s around to crowd them grow great and very strange.

In postindustrial civilisation, where animals are held to be irrelevant to adult concerns except insofar as they are useful or edible, animal story is mostly perceived as being for children.