Education Quote by David Eddings

There is a sly self-awareness baked into Eddings's line: the fantasy novelist as reluctant civic worker, slipping literacy lessons into entertainment like vitamins into dessert. The opening clause, "Call it my little gesture toward social conscience", performs a preemptive eye-roll. He frames the claim as something others might accuse him of, then adopts it anyway. That rhetorical dodge lets him flirt with moral purpose without committing to sanctimony.

The middle pivot is the real tell: "I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read". It's modest on paper ("a certain number"), but grand in implication. Eddings is staking out a defense of popular fiction as infrastructure. Not high art, not self-improvement literature, just a page-turner that keeps readers in the habit. The subtext is a quiet rebuttal to the gatekeeping that treats genre writing as disposable: if the book is "only" escapism, why does it keep people practicing the most foundational cultural skill?

Then he punctures his own balloon: "Now that sounds pretentious!" The punchline isn't just humility; it's a strategic inoculation against the charge that authors overestimate their importance. He wants credit for a public good while signaling he knows how ridiculous it sounds to claim you're improving society by writing wizards and quests. In late-20th-century mass-market publishing, where readership was expanding but cultural status was still policed, that joke lands as both apology and assertion: popular stories don't need permission to matter.