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It Doth Not Hurt", Whispered A Faint Voice, "she Will Take You Life And All You Are And All You Care'st For, And She Will Leave You With Nothing But Mist And Fog. She'll Take Your Joy. And One Day You'll Wake And Your Heart And Soul Will Have Gone. A Husk You'll Be, A Wisp You'll Be, And A Thing No More Than A Dream On Waking, Or A Memory Of Something Forgotten.

-Neil Gaiman

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It Doth Not Hurt",

Neil Gaiman

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It Doth Not Hurt", Whispered A Faint Voice, "she Will Take You Life And All You Are And All You Care'st For, And She Will Leave You With Nothing But Mist And Fog. She'll Take Your Joy. And One Day You'll Wake And Your Heart And Soul Will Have Gone. A Husk You'll Be, A Wisp You'll Be, And A Thing No More Than A Dream On Waking, Or A Memory Of Something Forgotten.

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You Must Never Imagine, That Just Because Something Is Funny, It Is Not Also Dangerous.

Perfection Is Like Chasing The Horizon. Keep Moving.

Until That Moment She Had Never Thought She Could Do It. Never Thought She Would Be Brave Enough Or Scared Enough, Or Desperate Enough To Dare.

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.

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.

The Best Thing—in Shadow's Opinion, Perhaps The Only Good Thing—about Being In Prison Was A Feeling Of Relief. The Feeling That He'd Plunged As Low As He Could Plunge And He'd Hit Bottom. He Didn't Worry That The Man Was Going To Get Him, Because The Man Had Got Him. He Was No Longer Scared Of What Tomorrow Might Bring, Because Yesterday Had Brought It.

I Believe We Have An Obligation To Read For Pleasure, In Private And In Public Places. If We Read For Pleasure, If Others See Us Reading, Then We Learn, We Exercise Our Imaginations. We Show Others That Reading Is A Good Thing.

My Ideal Reader Is Me. And Yes, My Ideal Reader Comes With Me And Is Forgiving.

Have You Ever Spent Days And Days And Days Making Up Flavors Of Ice Cream That No One's Ever Eaten Before? Like Chicken And Telepone Ice Cream? Green Mouse Ice Cream Was The Worst. I Didn't Like That At All.

It Occurs To Me That The Peculiarity Of Most Things We Think Of As Fragile Is How Tough They Truly Are. There Were Tricks We Did With Eggs, As Children, To Show How They Were, In Reality, Tiny Load-bearing Marble Halls; While The Beat Of The Wings Of A Butterfly In The Right Place, We Are Told, Can Create A Hurricane Across An Ocean. Hearts May Break, But Hearts Are The Toughest Of Muscles, Able To Pump For A Lifetime, Seventy Times A Minute, And Scarcely Falter Along The Way. Even Dreams, The Most Delicate And Intangible Of Things, Can Prove Remarkable Difficult To Kill.

I Believe That Stories Are Incredibly Important, Possibly In Ways We Don't Understand, In Allowing Us To Make Sense Of Our Lives, In Allowing Us To Escape Our Lives, In Giving Us Empathy And In Creating The World That We Live In.

I Would Not Describe Myself As A Political Writer Except In The Sense That The Personal Is Political, Which Is Something That I Do Strongly Believe. And In That Sense American Gods Is A Very Personal Novel And A Political Novel. I Was Trying To Describe The Experience Of Coming To America As An Immigrant, The Experience Of Watching The Way That America Tends To Eat Other Cultures.

For Some Folks Death Is Release, And For Others Death Is An Abomination, A Terrible Thing. But In The End, I'm There For All Of Them.

I Only Have Two Kinds Of Dreams: The Bad And The Terrible. Bad Dreams I Can Cope With. They're Just Nightmares, And The End Eventually. I Wake Up. The Terrible Dreams Are The Good Dreams. In My Terrible Dreams, Everything Is Fine. I Am Still With The Company. I Still Look Like Me. None Of The Last Five Years Ever Happened. Sometimes I'm Married. Once I Even Had Kids. I Even Knew Their Names. Everything's Wonderful And Normal And Fine. And Then I Wake Up, And I'm Still Me. And I'm Still Here. And That Is Truly Terrible.

If A Devil Is One Who Dares, When Others Hold Back, Then I Am Happy To Play The Devil In This Mystery, Boy.

M Is For Magic. All The Letters Are, If You Put Them Together Properly. You Can Make Magic With Them, And Dreams, And, I Hope, Even A Few Surprises.

There's None So Blind As Those Who Will Not Listen.

There Was Only One Guy In The Whole Bible Jesus Ever Personally Promised A Place With Him In Paradise. Not Peter, Not Paul, Not Any Of Those Guys. He Was A Convicted Thief, Being Executed. So Don't Knock The Guys On Death Row. Maybe They Know Something You Don't.

Some Of Us Claim That He Was A Messiah, And Some Think That He Was Just A Man With Very Special Powers. But That Misses The Point. Whatever He Was, He Changed The World.

There Is Something About Riding A Unicorn, For Those People Who Still Can, Which Is Unlike Any Other Experience: Exhilarating, And Intoxicating, And Fine.

None Of Us Exist In A World That Is The Same World That Any Of The Rest Of Us Live In. The World That's Important Is The World Behind Each Of Our Eyes, Which Is Something That None Of The Rest Of Us Can Access.

There Was A Hand In The Darkness, And It Held A Knife.

You Know What My Mum Once Said?’ Said Rosie… ‘she Said That If A Just-married Couple Put A Coin In A Jar Every Time They Make Love In Their First Year, And Take A Coin Out For Every Time That They Make Love In The Years That Follow, The Jar Will Never Be Emptied.’ And This Means…?’ Well’, She Said. ‘it’s Interesting, Isn’t It?

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.

The Biggest Pitfall To Avoid Is Not Writing. Not Writing Is Really, Really Easy To Do, Especially If You're A Young Writer. The Hope That Elves Will Come In The Night And Finish It For You, Is A Very Common One To Have. That Is My Main Recommendation - You Have To Write, And You Have To Finish What You Write And Beyond That, It's All Detail.

I Started Blogging A Decade Ago Because I Like Blogging. Writing's A Kind Of Lonely Thing To Do And I Liked The Idea Of Demystifying The Process Because I Loved It As A Kid And Teenager And As Somebody Who Wanted Desperately To Write.

We Build A Shell Around It, Like An Oyster Dealing With A Painful Particle Of Grit, Coating It With Smooth Pearl Layers In Order To Cope. This Is How We Walk And Talk And Function , Day In, Day Out. Immune To Others’ Pain And Loss.

When I Was A Kid And A Young Man I Read Everything. When I Was About 23, I Was Incredibly Lucky In That I Wound Up With Several Book Review Columns, Which Meant That I Had To Read Huge Amounts Of Stuff That Was Outside My Experience And Outside My Comfort Zone. I Think Every Young Writer Should Be Forced To Read The Kind Of Stuff They Would Not Normally Read For Pleasure.

Books Smell And Feel Better. They Have That Wonderful Thingness Of Turning The Pages.

A Library Is A Place That Is A Repository Of Information And Gives Every Citizen Equal Access To It.

I Will Be Brave, Thought Coraline. No, I Am Brave.

I Don't Think Immediate Tragedy Is A Very Good Source Of Art. It Can Be, But Too Often It's Raw And Painful And Un-dealt-with. Sometimes Art Can Be A Really Good Escape From The Intolerable, And A Good Place To Go When Things Are Bad, But That Doesn't Mean You Have To Write Directly About The Bad Thing; Sometimes You Need To Let Time Pass, And Allow The Thing That Hurts To Get Covered With Layers, And Then You Take It Out, Like A Pearl, And You Make Art Out Of It.

I Was The Kind Of Kid Whose Parents Would Drop Him Off At The Local Town Library On Their Way To Work, And I'd Go And Work My Way Through The Children's Area.

For A Moment He Thought She Was About To Hit Him, Which Would Have Been Bad, Or Even Start Crying, Which Would Have Been Much, Much Worse.

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