Art Matters

“I suggest that reading fiction, reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do.”

“We need to teach our children to read. And to enjoy reading. We need libraries. We need books.”

“I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.”

“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.”

“Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

“I believe that in battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true.”

“We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine.
It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

“Art matters because your imagination can change the world.”