“I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas”

I read a great article on Brain Pickings about on Neil Gaiman‘s thoughts about writing, many of which are about writing as the transmission medium for ideas.

The article includes a number of great quotes from Gaiman’s writings about, well, writing. Another of my favourite extracts is this one:

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes.

I especially like this line about the value of fiction writing:

Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Read “The Power of Cautionary Questions: Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Why We Read, and How Speculative Storytelling Enlarges Our Humanity” in its entirety on Brain Pickings:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/31/neil-gaiman-the-view-from-the-cheap-seats-bradbury/