The View from the Cheap Seats

Some people change. Kids you knew at school become investment bankers or bankruptcy specialists (failed). They fatten and they bald and somewhere you get the sense that they must have devoured the child they once were, eaten themselves bit by bit, mouthful by mouthful, until nothing is left of the smart, optimistic dreamer you knew when you were both young.

On a bad day, I worry that it’s happening to me.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was, in my mind, already too old for music to matter, too old for an album to change me and definitely too old to buy singles. I was twenty-eight

I hate writing speeches. When I was asked to give this one, my immediate thought was that maybe I could give a speech I’d already written, and no one would notice.

I don’t think I ever disliked anything as long or as well as I disliked school: the arbitrary violence, the lack of power, the pointlessness of so much of it. It did not help that I tended to exist in a world of my own, half-in-the-world, half-out-of-it, forever missing the information that somehow everyone else in the school managed to have obtained.

On the first day of term I felt sick and miserable, on the last day, elated. To my mind, “the happiest days of your life” was just one of those things that adults said that not even they could have believed; things like “this isn’t going to hurt” which were simply never true.

I DO NOTthink I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.

I wrote Coraline because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.

(It could happen. Things sometimes slipped their minds. They were busy people. One night they forgot to pick me up from school, and it was only a wistful phone call from the school, at ten o’clock at night, asking if they were expected to keep me, that finally got me picked up. One morning my parents dropped me off at school without noticing that the half-term break had begun, and I wandered, confused, around a locked and empty school until I was eventually rescued by a gardener. So it was unlikely, but it was possible.)

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty-first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me lowballing my own creativity.

have an obligation to daydream.