Excerpt
To treat literature as art doesn't require prostrate reverence before old men on dusty pedestals. Let me offer an example. Twenty years ago, in a calendar of Auckland city scenes, one photograph showed a beach front, a scoria embankment, and a man jogging past, allowing us to see the scale of things. In letters more than two feet high, and in a message about thirty feet long, someone had spray-painted on the scoria wall a great graffito, a single sentence: "Ralph, come back, it was only a rash."Also quoted in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2010)
