Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

Marketing rules, OK? I have no illusions that intelligence could possibly replace marketing in this or any other matter. Commercial genrification has its reasons. They are intelligible reasons, though not intelligent ones.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual, pysc

because they fulfill the most ancient, urgent function of words: to form for us “mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

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.

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual, pysc

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo.

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 think is the right way.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.