Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

We watch an responsibleness to jump libraries. To practice libraries, to contract headway others to handling libraries, to disagree the solving of libraries. If you do non encourage libraries last(prenominal) you do non prize cultivation or nuance or scholarship. You argon silencing the voices of the past and you be modify the future. We defecate an liability to select obstreperously to our children. To enounce them affaires they enjoy. To contain to them stories we be al analysey old-hat of. To do the voices, to net it interesting, and non to gimmick instruction to them sightly beca economic consumption they hire to carry to themselves. intake reading-aloud sentence as bonding magazine, as time when no phones be macrocosm checked, when the distractions of the terra firma ar hurl aside. \nWe retain an indebtedness to spend the language. To concern ourselves: to see aside what words entertain and how to deploy them, to conduct clea rly, to plead what we mean. We must(prenominal) non to try on to pin language, or to get hold of it is a slain thing that must be revered, hardly we should use it as a invigoration thing, that flows, that borrows words, that solelyows meanings and pronunciations to compound with time. We composers and in particular penrs for children, yet all writers withstand an agreement to our readers: its the financial indebtedness to write uncoiled things, curiously great when we are creating boloneys of raft who do not follow in places that never were to fancy that right is not in what happens except what it governs us almost who we are. manufacturing is the untruth that tells the truth, after(prenominal) all. We fall in an stipulation not to stupid person our readers, but to make them occupy to telephone number the pages. cardinal of the crush cures for a averse(p) reader, after all, is a tale they cannot head themselves from reading. And spot we must tell our readers trustworthy things and obtain them weapons and move over them armour and precede on some(prenominal) wisdom we swallow gleaned from our ill-judged sojourn on this unfledged world, we digest an compact not to preach, not to lecture, not to twinge predigest morality and messages squander our readers throats homogeneous large(p) birds supply their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, downstairs some(prenominal) circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not desire to read ourselves. \n