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There Was A Smile Dancing On His Lips, Although It Was A Wary Smile, For The World Is A Bigger Place Than A Little Graveyard On A Hill; And There Would Be Dangers In It And Mysteries, New Friends To Make, Old Friends To Rediscover, Mistakes To Be Made And Many Paths To Be Walked Before He Would, Finally, Return To The Graveyard Or Ride With The Lady On The Broad Back Of Her Great Grey Stallion.

-Neil Gaiman

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There Was A Smile

Neil Gaiman

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There Was A Smile Dancing On His Lips, Although It Was A Wary Smile, For The World Is A Bigger Place Than A Little Graveyard On A Hill; And There Would Be Dangers In It And Mysteries, New Friends To Make, Old Friends To Rediscover, Mistakes To Be Made And Many Paths To Be Walked Before He Would, Finally, Return To The Graveyard Or Ride With The Lady On The Broad Back Of Her Great Grey Stallion.

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If You Cared Enough About Your Characters, What Happened To Them Was Interesting... It's Important To Care About Them, About Who They Are And What They Do...i Don't Really Care Whose Side They Are On, And They Can Be Monstrous On The Outside Or, Worse, On The Inside, But You Still Have To Want To Spend Time With Them.

The War Had Begun And Nobody Saw It. The Storm Was Lowering And Nobody Knew It.

There Are Only Two Worlds - Your World, Which Is The Real World, And Other Worlds, The Fantasy. Worlds Like This Are Worlds Of The Human Imagination: Their Reality, Or Lack Of Reality, Is Not Important. What Is Important Is That They Are There. These Worlds Provide An Alternative. Provide An Escape. Provide A Threat. Provide A Dream, And Power; Provide Refuge, And Pain. They Give Your World Meaning. They Do Not Exist; And Thus They Are All That Matters.

The Lord Of Dreams Learns That One Must Change Or Die, And Makes His Decision

Look. I Brought You Here To Give You A Choice-" "you Didn't Bring Us Here," Said Nick. "you're Here," Said Bod. "i Wanted You Here. I Came Here. You Followed Me. Same Thing.

He Was Having More Fun Than A Barrelful Of Monkeys.* *several Years Earlier Spider Had Actually Been Tremendously Disappointed By A Barrelful Of Monkeys. It Had Done Nothing He Had Considered Particularly Entertaining, Apart From Emit Interesting Noises, And Eventually, Once The Noises Had Stopped And The Monkeys Were No Longer Doing Anything At All—except Possibly On An Organic Level—had Needed To Be Disposed Of In The Dead Of Night.

I Am An Academic," Said Professor Mandalay, "and Thus Have No Finely Developed Senses That Would Be Comprehensible To Anyone Who Has Not Ever Needed To Grade Papers Without Actually Reading The Blessed Things.

Use Your Blog To Connect. Use It As You. Don’t ‘network’ Or ‘promote.’ Just Talk.

Finish What You're Writing. Whatever You Have To Do To Finish It, Finish It.

Because,' She Said, 'when You're Scared But You Still Do It Anyway, That's Brave.

If You Give A Writer A Pile Of Blank Paper And Say You Can Write Anything You Like On Any Subject You Want At Any Length You Want, You Will Probably Never Get Anything At All, Whereas If You Have 900 Words To Write, And It's Fiction That Is Somehow Op-ed Fiction, And It Needs To Tie In With Halloween . . . Okay, Those Are My Constraints, That's Where I Now Need To Start Building Something.

Most Of What I Want To Try To Do Is Continue To Go Places With Fiction That I've Never Gone Before, And Tell Stories I've Never Told Before, And One Of The Problems You Rapidly Discover About Fans Is What Fans Want Is The Last Thing They Liked. They Want More Of That.

With Pornography, If You Don't Get Hard Or Wet, Depending On Your Gender, It Didn't Work. With Humour, If You Don't Laugh It Didn't Work. And With Horror, If You Don't Get Scared Or Haunted, Depending On What It's Trying To Do, It Didn't Work. I'm Fascinated By Those Three Categories.

Here You Go, She Said. I Don't Need It Anymore. I'm Very Grateful. I Think It May Have Saved My Life, Saved Some Other People's Death.

I Do Not Permit Affection Or Lack Thereof To Influence My Actions. There Is Good, And There Is Evil. The Good Must Be Protected, The Evil Eradicated. I Have Shown You The Triumph Of Evil As A Caution.

Even If Your Goose Habitually Lays Golden Eggs, It Will Still Be Cooked.

A Good Writer Should Be Able To Write Comedic Work That Made You Laugh, And Scary Stuff That Made You Scared, And Fantasy Or Science Fiction That Imbued You With A Sense Of Wonder, And Mainstream Journalism That Gave You Clear And Concise Information In A Way That You Wanted It.

And I Would Try And Walk Far Enough Away That People Would Not Assume I Was With Him.

And Then It Went, And Time Passed Properly Once More, Every Second Following Every Other Second Just Like They're Meant To.

All Your Questions Can Be Answered, If That Is What You Want. But Once You Learn Your Answers, You Can Never Unlearn Them.

Unanswered Questions

On The Whole, Stories Don't Write Themselves.

American Gods Was Designed To Be If Not Open-ended, At Least A Trilogy Kind Of Shape, So There's Definitely One More Book, Probably Another Couple Of Books There To Get Written.

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.

It's Only A World, After All, And They're Just Sand Grains In The Desert, Worlds.

In Ten Years Time I’ll Be… (dead) Sixty.

I've Learned Over The Years That Everything Is More Or Less The Same Amount Of Work, So You May As Well Set Your Sights High And Try And Do Something Really Cool.

It's Not The Fish You Catch, It's The Peace Of Mind You Take Home At The End Of The Day.

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.

Whatever It Takes To Finish Things, Finish. You Will Learn More From A Glorious Failure Than You Ever Will From Something You Never Finished.

Whatever It Takes

Sleep My Little Baby-oh Sleep Until You Waken When You Wake You'll See The World If I'm Not Mistaken... Kiss A Lover Dance A Measure, Find Your Name And Buried Treasure... Face Your Life Its Pain, Its Pleasure, Leave No Path Untaken.

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

The Boy Had The Towering Arrogance Only Seen In The Greatest Of Artists And All Nine-year-old Boys.

Remember That, Sooner Or Later, Before It Ever Reaches Perfection, You Will Have To Let It Go And Move On And Start To Write The Next Thing. Perfection Is Like Chasing The Horizon. Keep Moving.

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.

Where Magic Is Concerned, There Is Always An Initial Decision, An Initial Willingness To Let It Enter Your Life. If That Is Not There Neither Is Magic.

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.

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