The Well of Lost Plots

No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.

The leader was identified by his dental records—why he had them on him, no one was quite sure.

Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.

Preservation without expenditure is worthless.

Tyrants are all the same—shocking temper when they don’t get their own way!

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.

The atmosphere in the room was so thick with dramatic clichés you could have cut it with a knife.

“Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,” replied Snell as we walked along. “The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer—perhaps more.”

“Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.”

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception.