“In both novels I’ve written there’s been one character who has turned up and said to me, ‘It’s OK. Relax. I’ve got this.’ In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell it was Childermass. Whenever he appeared in a scene I felt like he pulled up a chair for me to sit down, made me a cup of tea, and told me he would handle everything. And then he pretty much wrote the scene for me. I loved Childermass. (I still do.) In Piranesi there was a character a little bit like that, but he was a very different person from Childermass and I didn’t exactly love him. It was the Prophet. When the Prophet appeared he waved me airily aside and then just wrote his own dialogue. I had to type really fast to keep up. And when he had finished, he looked round and smiled, like he was saying, ‘That’s the way it’s done.’ And then he strutted off.”
Demonstration of the `apparatus of a mobile stage for the representation of tragic, comic and satirical perspective and pulpit,Giovanni Battista Piranesi
“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”
