"Prefer duplication over wrong abstractions."

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"Writing for me is an entrance into abstractionan escape from the accidents and humiliations of biology and the banality of daily routine into an objective space occupied by carved and austere shapes." Camille Paglia

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The more fearful the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. What can be inferred about the world when art becomes absurd? -- Paul Klee (1915)

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Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks.

Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, Neil Gaiman