"I think it's short-sighted. For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money. They recently did a survey that showed that among poor white boys in England, 45% have reading difficulties and cannot read for pleasure. Which is a monstrous statistic, especially when you start thinking about it as a statistic that measures not just literacy but also as a measure of imagination and empathy, because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.
So in that context, as far as I'm concerned, closing libraries is endangering the future. You know, at least with the libraries there, you're in with a chance."
--Neil Gaiman in the Guardian's edited extract from an interview in Create, which will be published
by the Arts Council today via Shelf Awareness
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