The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

. . . how it can mark a dead man’s thoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

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.

The best of Poe doesn’t date.

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.

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

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

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

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