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If You Were Close Enough To Her Ruby-red Lips You Would Hear Her Say, 'i Will Rise Now And Go About The City In The Streets, And In The Broad Ways I Will Seek The One I Love.' She Is Whispering That, And She Whispers, 'by Night On My Bed I Sought Him Whom My Soul Loveth. Let Him Kiss Me With The Kisses Of His Mouth. My Beloved Is Mine And I Am His.

-Neil Gaiman

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If You Were Close

Neil Gaiman

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If You Were Close Enough To Her Ruby-red Lips You Would Hear Her Say, 'i Will Rise Now And Go About The City In The Streets, And In The Broad Ways I Will Seek The One I Love.' She Is Whispering That, And She Whispers, 'by Night On My Bed I Sought Him Whom My Soul Loveth. Let Him Kiss Me With The Kisses Of His Mouth. My Beloved Is Mine And I Am His.

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If Writing A Novel Is A Year's Exile To A Foreign Country, Writing A Short Story Is A Weekend Spent Somewhere Exotic. They're Much More Like Vacations, More Exciting And Different, And You're Off.

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Freedom Of Speech

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Make Your Mistakes, Next Year And Forever.

Children, As I Have Said, Use Back Ways And Hidden Paths, While Adults Take Roads And Official Paths.

Time Is Fluid Here', Said The Demon.

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Thought Provoking

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You See, The Outcome Of The Battle Is Unimportant. What Matters Is The Chaos, And The Slaughter.

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Often You Will Discover That The Harder You Work, And The More Wisely You Work, The Luckier You Get. But There Is Luck, And It Helps.

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The Old Rules Are Crumbling And Nobody Knows What The New Rules Are...so Make Up Your Own Rules.

We Have An Obligation To Read Aloud To Our Children. To Read Them Things They Enjoy. To Read To Them Stories We Are Already Tired Of. To Do The Voices, To Make It Interesting, And Not To Stop Reading To Them Just Because They Learn To Read To Themselves. Use Reading-aloud Time As Bonding Time, As Time When No Phones Are Being Checked, When The Distractions Of The World Are Put Aside.

Here Are Your Instructions, Crowley. And Suddenly He Knew. He Hated That. They Could Just As Easily Have Told Him, They Didn't Suddenly Have To Drop Chilly Knowledge Straight Into His Brain.

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I Like Airplanes. I Like Anywhere That Isn't A Proper Place. I Like In Betweens.

There's A Glorious Sense Of Freedom In Comedy, Just Allowing Myself To Tell Jokes, Allowing Myself To Interrupt Myself And Tell Old African Folk Stories That I Made Up - Or Didn't - And Jamaican Stories.

It’s Not That They’re Small, The Fair Folk. Especially Not The Queen Of Them All, Mab Of The Flashing Eyes And The Slow Smile With Lips That Can Conjure Your Heart Under The Hills For A Hundred Years. It’s Not That They’re Small. It’s That We’re So Far Away.

So I Went Out And Bought Myself A Copy Of The Writer And Artist Yearbook, Bought Lots Of Magazines And Got On The Phone And Talked To Editors About Ideas For Stories. Pretty Soon I Found Myself Hired To Do Interviews And Articles And Went Off And Did Them.

Being A Writer Is A Very Peculiar Sort Of A Job: It's Always You Versus A Blank Sheet Of Paper (or A Blank Screen) And Quite Often The Blank Piece Of Paper Wins.

I Do Not Threaten, I Merely Advise Caution.

Everything He Had Ever Done That Had Been Better Left Undone. Every Lie He Had Told — Told To Himself, Or Told To Others. Every Little Hurt, And All The Great Hurts. Each One Was Pulled Out Of Him, Detail By Detail, Inch By Inch. The Demon Stripped Away The Cover Of Forgetfulness, Stripped Everything Down To Truth, And It Hurt More Than Anything.

Spider Venom Comes In Many Forms. It Can Often Take A Long While To Discover The Full Effects Of The Bite. Naturalists Have Pondered This For Years: There Are Spiders Whose Bite Can Cause The Place Bitten To Rot And To Die, Sometimes More Than A Year After It Was Bitten. As To Why Spiders Do This, The Answer Is Simple. It's Because Spiders Think This Is Funny, And They Don't Want You Ever To Forget Them.

Firstly, There No Such Person As Death. Second, Death's This Tall Guy With A Bone Face, Like A Skeletal Monk, With A Scythe And An Hourglass And A Big White Horse And A Penchant For Playing Chess With Scandinavians. Third, He Doesn't Exist Either.

There's Not Much High And Low Culture Any More: There's Just Mingling Streams Of Art And What Matters Is Whether It's Good Art Or Bad Art.

You Attend The Funeral, You Bid The Dead Farewell. You Grieve. Then You Continue With Your Life. And At Times The Fact Of Her Absence Will Hit You Like A Blow To The Chest, And You Will Weep. But This Will Happen Less And Less As Time Goes On. She Is Dead. You Are Alive. So Live.

It Felt Like A Small Forever.

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People Kill What They Fear. They Burned, And Drowned, And Hanged Those They Saw As Witches, The Devil's Servants: The Wise Women And The Cunning Men, The Unfortunate, The Lost And The Strange

Fiction Is The Lie That Tells The Truth, After All.

Telling The Truth

There's This Thing, They Have In French: L'espirit D'escalier. The Spirit Of The Stairway. I Don't Think We Have A Word For It In English. It Means, Well, The Clever Things To Say That You Only Think To Yourself When You're On The Way Out.

He Had Had A Severe Shock Some Weeks Earlier, When, Having Narrowly Failed To Capture A Large Grey-brown Hare For His Dinner, It Had Stopped At The Edge Of The Forest, Looked At Him With Disdain, And Said, 'well, I Hope You're Proud Of Yourself, That's All,' And Had Scampered Off Into The Long Grass

That Is The Eternal Folly Of Man. To Be Chasing After The Sweet Flesh, Without Realizing That It Is Simply A Pretty Cover For The Bones.

He Goes His Way. We Travel A Spiral. The Quickest Way Is Sometimes The Longest.

Love Me When I Least Deserve It, Because That’s When I Really Need It.

The Magic Of Comics Is That There Are Three People Involved In Any Comic: There Is Whoever Is Writing It, And Whoever Is Drawing It, And Then There's Whoever Is Reading It, Because The Really Important Things In Comics Are Occurring In The Panel Gutters, They're Occurring Between Panels As The Person Reading The Comics Is Moving You Through, Is Creating A Film In Their Heads.

It's Easier To Lie To Yourself When You Say Things Out Loud.

Never Use Five Words If You Can Get Away With One, Eh? I've Known Dead Men Talk More Than You Do.

I Feel Like I Am Involved In An Obscure And Complex Version Of Poker In A Pitch-dark Room, With Blank Cards, For Infinite Stakes, With A Dealer Who Won't Tell Me The Rules, And Who Smiles All The Time.

They Believe Themselves Lucifer's Equals, Cain, All These Pitiful Little Gnats. But There Is Only One That We Have Ever Owned To Be Our Superior. There Is But One Greater Than Us, And To Him... To Him We No Longer Speak.

I Don't Think You Get Perfect Couples. At Best You Get Two People Building Something, And Working At It, And Loving Each Other, And Doing Their Best To Communicate.

I Think I Love My Dreaming Process Because One Of The Things That My Dreaming Process Does Is Sort Out Stories For Me.

I Love Learning. I Tend To Stop Doing Things Once I Get Good At Them, And To Try Something Else I'm Not As Good At, Leaving A Bunch Of Fans Going, "but He Was Really Good At That. Why Isn't He Still Doing It?"

Great, Big, Serious Novels Always Get Awards. If It's A Battle Between A Great, Big, Serious Novel And A Funny Novel, The Funny Novel Is Doomed.

Any Way, Death Is So Final, Isn't It? "is It?" Asked Richard. "sometimes," Said The Marquis De Carabas. And They Went Down.

When You Start Off, You Have To Deal With The Problems Of Failure. You Need To Be Thickskinned, To Learn That Not Every Project Will Survive.

And So There Is Magic.

The Names Are The First Things To Go, After The Breath Has Gone, And The Beating Of The Heart. We Keep Our Memories Longer Than Our Names.

So The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Is Out There Preserving And Fighting For, And Sometimes Winning And Sometimes Losing, The Fight For First Amendment Rights In Comics And, More Generally, For Freedom Of Speech.

Words Save Our Lives, Sometimes.

You Know I Love You,' Said The Other Mother Flatly. 'you Have A Very Funny Way Of Showing It,' Said Coraline.

One Cannot Begin A New Dream Without Abandoning The Last [one].

Are We Human Because We Gaze At The Stars Or Do We Gaze At The Stars Because We Are Human?

The Tv's The Altar. I'm What People Are Sacrificing To.' 'what Do They Sacrifice?' Asked Shadow. 'their Time, Mostly,' Said Lucy. 'sometimes Each Other.

In Film, A Lot Of The Time You're Not As Engaged, It Is All Being Given To You, And You're Accepting It As It Comes In, But In Comics, As A Reader, You Are Going To Have To Work, Your Imagination Needs To Do An Awful Lot.

Too Soon, The Sun Will Rise.

I Wanted To Be An Author As Far Back As I Can Remember, Mixed With Occasional Bouts Of Wanting To Be A Werewolf When I Grew Up. But Mostly, When I Daydreamed, It Was About Being An Author.

I Mean, Maybe I Am Crazy. I Mean, Maybe. But If This Is All There Is, Then I Don't Want To Be Sane.

Writing's A Lot Like Cooking. Sometimes The Cake Won't Rise, No Matter What You Do, And Every Now And Again The Cake Tastes Better Than You Ever Could Have Dreamed It Would.

Amy: This Time Can We... Lose The Bunk Beds? The Doctor: No Bunk Beds Are Cool, A Bed With A Ladder, You Can't Beat That!

Sometimes Life Is Hard. Things Go Wrong—in Life And In Love And In Business And In Friendship And In Health And In All The Other Ways That Life Can Go Wrong. And When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. . . . Someone On The Internet Thinks What You’re Doing Is Stupid Or Evil Or It’s All Been Done Before: Make Good Art. Probably Things Will Work Out Somehow, Eventually Time Will Take The Sting Away, And It Doesn’t Even Matter. Do What Only You Can Do Best: Make Good Art.

We Who Make Stories Know That We Tell Lies For A Living. But They Are Good Lies That Say True Things, And We Owe It To Our Readers To Build Them As Best We Can. Because Somewhere Out There Is Someone Who Needs That Story. Someone Who Will Grow Up With A Different Landscape, Who Without That Story Will Be A Different Person. And Who With That Story May Have Hope, Or Wisdom, Or Kindness, Or Comfort. And That Is Why We Write.

On The Whole, Anything That Gets You Writing And Keeps You Writing Is A Good Thing. Anything That Stops You Writing Is A Bad Thing.

I Believe That Anyone Who Claims To Know What's Going On Will Lie About The Little Things Too.

Nobody's American," Said Wednesday. "not Originally. That's My Point.

Ray Bradbury Was Not Ahead Of His Time. He Was Perfectly Of His Time, And More Than That: He Created His Time And Left His Mark On The Time That Followed.

Not Knowing Everything Is All That Makes It Ok, Sometimes.

Knowing Everything

Adults Should Not Weep, I Knew. They Did Not Have Mothers Who Would Comfort Them.

You Know What The Really Scary Thing About Bad Dreams? It's That Something's Going On In Your Head, And You Can't Control It. I Mean, It's Like There's These Bad Worlds Inside You. But It's Just You... It's Like You're Betraying Yourself.

Remember Your Name. Do Not Lose Hope ---what You Seek Will Be Found.

Following Instructions

So The Day Became One Of Waiting, Which Was, He Knew, A Sin: Moments Were To Be Experienced; Waiting Was A Sin Against Both The Time That Was Still To Come And The Moments One Was Currently Disregarding.

It's Just Harder Out There In The World Of The Living, And We Cannot Protect You Out There As Easily. I Wanted To Keep You Perfectly Safe...but There Is Only One Perfectly Safe Place For Your Kind, And You Will Not Reach It Until All Your Adventures Are Over And None Of Them Matter Any Longer.

Too Much Talking These Days. Talk Talk Talk. This Country Would Get Along Much Better If People Learned How To Suffer In Silence.

I Like The Stars. It's The Illusion Of Permanence, I Think. I Mean, They're Always Flaring Up And Caving In And Going Out. But From Here, I Can Pretend...i Can Pretend That Things Last. I Can Pretend That Lives Last Longer Than Moments. Gods Come, And Gods Go. Mortals Flicker And Flash And Fade. Worlds Don't Last; And Stars And Galaxies Are Transient, Fleeting Things That Twinkle Like Fireflies And Vanish Into Cold And Dust. But I Can Pretend.

Write Or Draw Or Build Or Sing Or Live As Only You Can. And I Hope, Somewhere In The Next Year, You Surprise Yourself.

You Were Her Way Here, And It's A Dangerous Thing To Be A Door.

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Patrick Rothfuss

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