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We Have An Obligation To Make Things Beautiful. Not To Leave The World Uglier Than We Found It, Not To Empty The Oceans, Not To Leave Our Problems For The Next Generation.

-Neil Gaiman

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We Have An Obligation

Neil Gaiman

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We Have An Obligation To Make Things Beautiful. Not To Leave The World Uglier Than We Found It, Not To Empty The Oceans, Not To Leave Our Problems For The Next Generation.

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He Stared Up At The Stars: And It Seemed To Him Then That They Were Dancers, Stately And Graceful, Performing A Dance Almost Infinite In Its Complexity.

Sister Mary Chose That Moment To Come In With The Tea. Satanist Or Not, She'd Also Found A Plate And Arranged Some Iced Biscuits On It.

There Are Stories That Are True, In Which Each Individual's Tale Is Unique And Tragic, And The Worst Of The Tragedy Is That We Have Heard It Before, And We Cannot Allow Ourselves To Feel It To Deeply. 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. If It Were To Touch Us It Would Cripple Us Or Make Saints Of Us; But, For The Most Part, It Does Not Touch Us. We Cannot Allow It To.

Her Other Mother Smiled Brightly And The Hair On Her Head Drifted Like Plants Under The Sea.

And Sometimes When You Fall... You Fly...

You Shone Like A Star. The Funniest, Wisest Writer & The Finest Friend

Put One Word After Another. Find The Right Word, Put It Down.

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.

With 'stardust', I Hope What I Was Doing Is Giving 30-year-olds And 40-year-olds And 25-year-olds And 60-year-olds A Chance To Get The Same Sense Of Wonder, The Same Feeling, The Same Magic, That They Got In Reading The Classic Fairy Tales As Children.

I Would Read. I Would Explore

Touched By Her Fingers, The Two Surviving Chocolate People Copulate Desperately, Losing Themselves In A Melting Frenzy Of Lust, Spending The Last Of Their Brief Borrowed Lives In A Spasm Of Raspberry Cream And Fear.

Never Mind. There. For Good Or Bad. It's Done.

Goodbyes Are Overrated.

But Surely "argh" Is The Sound Of A Sort Of Strangulated Scream. "aargh" Is The Sound Of A Stabbing, Or A Falling Off A Cliff. "arr" Is, I Think, The Noise You're Looking For. It's The Noise Pirates Make When They Don't Have Anything Better To Do. "arr, Jim Lad" = Pirate Noise. "aargh, Jim Lad" = Sound Of Pirate Falling Off A Cliff.

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

I Think I’ll Dismember The World And Then I’ll Dance In The Wreckage.

You Can't Just Boss Bacteria Around Like That," Said The Younger Mrs. Hempstock. "they Don't Like It." "stuff And Silliness," Said The Old Lady. "you Leave Wigglers Alone And They'll Be Carrying On Like Anything. Show Them Who's Boss And They Can't Do Enough For You. You've Tasted My Cheese.

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.

I'm Never Quite Sure If I'm Me When I'm Dressed Up.

In A World Where People Die Every Day, I Think The Important Thing To Remember Is That For Each Moment Of Sorrow We Get When People Leave This World There's A Corresponding Moment Of Joy When A New Baby Comes Into This World. That First Wail Is-well, It's Magic, Isn't It? Perhaps It's A Hard Thing To Say, But Joy And Sorrow Are Like Milk And Cookies. That's How Well They Go Together. I Think We Should All Take A Moment To Meditate On That.

We Make Choices. No One Else Can Live Our Lives For Us. And We Must Confront And Accept The Consequences Of Our Actions.

It May Help To Understand Human Affairs To Be Clear That Most Of The Great Triumphs And Tragedies Of History Are Caused, Not By People Being Fundamentally Good Or Fundamentally Bad, But By People Being Fundamentally People.

We Live In A World In Which The Only Utopian Visions Arrive In Commercial Breaks: Magical Visions Of An Impossibly Hospitable World, Peopled By Bright-eyed Attractive Men, Women, Children... Where Nobody Dies... In My Worlds People Died. And I Thought That Was Honest. I Thought I Was Being Honest.

Chicago Happened Slowly, Like A Migraine. First They Were Driving Through Countryside, Then, Imperceptibly, The Occasional Town Became A Low Suburban Sprawl, And The Sprawl Became The City.

If It's True That Every Seven Years Each Cell In Your Body Dies And Is Replaced, Then I Have Truly Inherited My Life From A Dead Man; And The Misdeeds Of Those Times Have Been Forgiven, And Are Buried With His Bones.

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

Fiction Takes Us To Places That We Would Never Otherwise Go, And Puts Us Behind Eyes That Are Not Our Own.

It Is A Fool's Prerogative To Utter Truths That No One Else Will Speak.

The Wise Man Knows When To Keep Silent. Only The Fool Tells All He Knows.

With American Gods I Was Trying Very, Very Consciously - There Was A Level At Which It Was A Little Like Trying To Write A Novel In French - You Know, "this Novel Is To Be Written In American."

Life Is A Rock, But The Radio Rolled Me Over.

I Don't Know Why People Would Want To Have Lunch With Writers. I've Eaten With Writers. We Have Appalling Table Manners, And Rarely Say Anything Other Than 'pass The Salt' Or 'if You're Not Going To Eat That, Can I Have It?'

I Started Out Writing Much More Science Fictiony Stuff And Writing About Science Fiction.

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.

Google Can Bring You Back 100,000 Answers. A Librarian Can Bring You Back The Right One.

Thought Provoking

I Don't Believe In "writer's Block". I Try And Deal With Getting Stuck By Having More Than One Thing To Work On At A Time. And By Knowing That Even A Hundred Bad Words That Didn't Exist Before Is Forward Progress.

I Was A Normal Child. Which Is To Say, I Was Selfish And I Was Not Entirely Convinced Of The Existence Of Things That Were Not Me, And I Was Certain, Rock-solid, Unshakeably Certain, That I Was The Most Important Thing In Creation. There Was Nothing That Was More Important To Me Than I Was.

I've Been Making A List Of The Things They Don't Teach You At School. They Don't Teach You How To Love Somebody. They Don't Teach You How To Be Famous. They Don't Teach You How To Be Rich Or How To Be Poor. They Don't Teach You How To Walk Away From Someone You Don't Love Any Longer. They Don't Teach You How To Know What's Going On In Someone Else's Mind. They Don't Teach You What To Say To Someone Who's Dying. They Don't Teach You Anything Worth Knowing.

When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. I'm Serious. Husband Runs Off With A Politician -- Make Good Art. Leg Crushed And Then Eaten By A Mutated Boa Constrictor -- Make Good Art. Irs On Your Trail -- Make Good Art. Cat Exploded -- 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.

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

This Is A Work Of Fiction. Still, Given An Infinite Number Of Possible Worlds, It Must Be True On One Of Them. And If A Story Set In An Infinite Number Of Possible Worlds Is True In One Of Them, Then It Must Be True In All Of Them. So Maybe, It's Not As Fictional As We Think.

I Don't Know. I Had To Be Something, Didn't I?

Notoriety Wasn't As Good As Fame, But Was Heaps Better Than Obscurity.

What Do I Do Now?” “i Don’t Know. Fade Away, Perhaps. Or Find Another Role.

The Young Woman Was Crying, In The Way That Grownups Cry, Keeping It Inside As Much As They Can, And Hating It When It Still Pushes Out At The Edges, Making Them Ugly And Funny-looking On The Way.

While Clothes Do Not, As The Saying Would Sometimes Have It, Make The Man, And Fine Feathers Do Not Make Fine Birds, Sometimes They Can Add A Certain Spice To A Recipe.

I Know That The Way To Be A Really Successful Writer Is To Write The Same Kind Of Book Over And Over Again. Find The Kind Of Thing That People Like And Just Write One Of Those Over And Over Again. I Don't Do That. I Just Keep Doing Different Things.

The Truth Is, It's Not The Idea, It's Never The Idea, It's Always What You Do With It.

I Don't Think I'm Mainstream. I Think What I Am Is Lots And Lots Of Different Cults. And When You Get Lots And Lots Of Small Groups Who Like You A Lot, They Add Up To A Big Group Without Ever Actually Becoming Mainstream.

You Wouldn't Die In Here, Nothing Ever Dies In Here, But If You Stayed Here For Too Long, After A While Just A Little Of You Would Exist Everywhere, All Spread Out. And That's Not A Good Thing. Never Enough Of You All Together In One Place, So T Here Wouldn't Be Anything Left That Would Think Of Itself As An 'i.' No Point Of View Any Longer, Because You'd Be An Infinite Sequence Of Views And Of Points.

We Owe It To Each Other To Tell Stories.

If I Come Back, It Will Be A Place, But It Won't Be A Home Any Longer.

Nothing’s Changed. You’ll Go Home. You’ll Be Bored. You’ll Be Ignored. No One Will Listen To You, Really Listen To You. You’re Too Clever And Too Quiet For Them To Understand. They Don’t Even Get Your Name Right.

He Was Painfully Shy, Which, As Is Often The Manner Of The Painfully Shy, He Overcompensated For By Being Too Loud At The Wrong Times.

Yes. Growing Up Is Highly Overrated. Just Be An Author.

The Lovely Thing About Writing Comics For So Many Years Is That Comics Is A Medium That Is Mistaken For A Genre. It's Not That There Are Not Genres Within Comics, But Because Comics Tend To Be Regarded As A Genre In Itself, Content Becomes Secondary; As Long As I Was Doing A Comic, People Would Pick It Up.

Have You Thought About What It Means To Be A God?" Asked The Man. He Had A Beard And A Baseball Cap. "it Means You Give Up Your Mortal Existence To Become A Meme: Something That Lives Forever In People's Minds, Like The Tune Of A Nursery Rhyme. It Means That Everyone Gets To Re-create You In Their Own Minds. You Barely Have Your Own Identity Any More. Instead, You're A Thousand Aspects Of What People Need You To Be. And Everyone Wants Something Different From You. Nothing Is Fixed, Nothing Is Stable.

You Get What Anybody Gets - You Get A Lifetime.

Inspirational Life

Do The Stuff That Only You Can Do. The Urge, Starting Out, Is To Copy. And That's Not A Bad Thing. Most Of Us Only Find Our Own Voices After We've Sounded Like A Lot Of Other People. But The One Thing That You Have That Nobody Else Has Is You. Your Voice, Your Mind, Your Story, Your Vision. So Write And Draw And Build And Play And Dance And Live As Only You Can. The Moment That You Feel That, Just Possibly, You're Walking Down The Street Naked, Exposing Too Much Of Your Heart And Your Mind And What Exists On The Inside, Showing Too Much Of Yourself. That's The Moment You May Be Starting To Get It Right.

Reading Is Important. Books Are Important. Librarians Are Important. (also, Libraries Are Not Child-care Facilities, But Sometimes Feral Children Raise Themselves Among The Stacks.)

All Good Technology Should Be Used To Piss Off People's Parents.

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.

I Watch My Heart Disappearing Into Her Rosebud Mouth. My Valentine's Jest Somehow Seems Less Funny.

Like Some Kind Of Particularly Tenacious Vampire The Short Story Refuses To Die, And Seems At This Point In Time To Be A Wonderful Length For Our Generation.

Not Only Are There No Happy Endings,' She Told Him, 'there Aren't Even Any Endings.

I Was Kidnapped By Aliens, They Came Down From Outer Space With Ray Guns, But I Fooled Them By Wearing A Wig And Laughing In A Foreign Accent, And I Escaped.

A Flash Of Resentment. It's Hard Enough Being Alive, Trying To Survive In The World And Find Your Place In It, To Do The Things You Need To Do To Get By, Without Wondering If The Thing You Just Did, Whatever It Was, Was Worth Someone Having...if Not Died, Then Having Given Up Her Life. It Wasn't Fair. "life's Not Fair," Said Ginnie, As If I Had Spoken Aloud.

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

Oh, Monsters Are Scared. That's Why They're Monsters.

There Are Three Things, And Three Things Only, That Can Lift The Pain Of Mortality And Ease The Ravages Of Life. These Are Wine, Women And Song.

But How Can You Walk Away From Something And Still Come Back To It?

When We Hold Each Other, In The Darkness, It Doesn't Make The Darkness Go Away. The Bad Things Are Still Out There. The Nightmares Still Walking. When We Hold Each Other We Feel Not Safe, But Better. "it's All Right" We Whisper, "i'm Here, I Love You." And We Lie: "i'll Never Leave You." For Just A Moment Or Two The Darkness Doesn't Seem So Bad.

Every Ending Is A New Beginning. Your Lucky Number Is None. Your Lucky Colour Is Dead. Motto: Like Father, Like Son.

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.

Memory Is The Great Deceiver. Perhaps There Are Some Individuals Whose Memories Act Like Tape Recordings, Daily Records Of Their Lives Complete In Every Detail, But I Am Not One Of Them. My Memory Is A Patchwork Of Occurrences, Of Discontinuous Events Roughly Sewn Together: The Parts I Remember, I Remember Precisely, Whilst Other Sections Seemed To Have Vanished Completely.

Everything In Journalism Is About The Detail That Makes The Whole, The Attempts To Reproduce Speech Patterns While Not Actually Quoting The Whole Thing The Person Said.

Richard Began To Understand Darkness: Darkness As Something Solid And Real, So Much More Than A Simple Absence Of Light. He Felt It Touch His Skin, Questing, Moving, Exploring: Gliding Through His Mind. It Slipped Into His Lungs, Behind His Eyes, Into His Mouth.

On The First Day Coraline's Family Moved In, Miss Spink And Miss Forcible Made A Point Of Telling Coraline How Dangerous The Well Was, And They Warned Her To Be Sure She Kept Away From It. So Coraline Set Off To Explore For It, So That She Knew Where It Was, To Keep Away From It Properly.

How Can You Be Happy In This World? You Have A Hole In Your Heart. You Have A Gateway Inside You To Lands Beyond The World You Know. They Will Call You, As You Grow.

Continuity Isn't Actually Something That I Ever Worry About. You Use It Where You Need To, And You Don't Use It Where You Don't Need To.

Every Now And Then I'll Do Little Things, A Short Story Or Something, That Doesn't Have Any Fantastical Elements, But Mostly I Like The Power Of Playing God And I Like To Imagine Things.

When I Was A Child, Adults Would Tell Me Not To Make Things Up, Warning Me Of What Would Happen If I Did. As Far As I Can Tell So Far, It Seems To Involve Lots Of Foreign Travel And Not Having To Get Up Too Early In The Morning.

Face Your Life, Its Pain, Its Pleasure, Leave No Path Untaken.

And So There Is Magic.

One Of The Things I'm Concerned About Is That I Really Want To Make Sure The Races Of All The Characters Are Kept. I Don't Like It When Black Characters Become White In Movies, Or Things Like That.

Because There Are Mysteries. Because There Are Things That People Are Forbidden To Speak About. Because There Are Things They Do Not Remember.

I Love Writing In Longhand. Writing In Longhand, I Think, Is A Marvelous Thing To Do For A Writer These Days. If You Have A Notebook And A Nice Pen You Can Go Off Somewhere, You Can Write That's Solar Powered. You Can Drop It Or Get It Wet And Pretty Much All Of Your Work Will Continue To Be There. If You Suddenly Decide To Look Up A Word Or Check A Reference You Will Not Look Up Four Hours Later, Blinking, Finding Yourself Somehow In The Middle Of An Ebay Auction You Never Had Any Plans To Be Part Of.

Nothing's Ever The Same," She Said. "be It A Second Later Or A Hundred Years. It's Always Churning And Roiling. And People Change As Much As Oceans.

The Tongue Is The Most Remarkable. For We Use It Both To Taste Out Sweet Wine And Bitter Poison, Thus Also Do We Utter Words Both Sweet And Sout With The Same Tongue.

I Enjoy Writing Scripts. I Can Find Out What Happens. With An Outline, I Feel Like I'm Doing An Architectural Diagram Of Something.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula Is Back In Print, And We Must Celebrate. It Was The First Mash-up Of Literature, History And Vampires, And Now, In A World In Which Vampires Are Everywhere, It's Still The Best, And Its Bite Is Just As Sharp. Compulsory Reading, Commentary, And Mindgame: Glorious.

Literature History

The Trouble With Everything, These Days, For Me, Is Time. There Is Only One Me. There Are A Ridiculous Number Of Demands On My Time. There Are So Many Things I'm Trying To Do. It's So Much More About When I'm Going To Get Time To Do It, If I Get Time.

Writing May Or May Not Be Your Salvation; It Might Or Might Not Be Your Destiny. But That Does Not Matter. What Matters Right Now Are The Words, One After Another. Find The Next Word. Write It Down.

You Have To Finish Things - That's What You Learn From, You Learn By Finishing Things.

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.

I Have World Class Photographic Red-eye Pretty Much All The Time. As A General Rule, If It's Taken With A Flash, I Look Like I Am Possessed By The Blazing Forces Of Darkness, At Least In The Eye Department.

Someone Killed My Mother And My Father And My Sister?" "yes, Someone Did." "a Man?" "a Man." "which Means," Said Bod, "you're Asking The Wrong Question." Silas Raised An Eyebrow. "how So?" "well," Said Bod. "if I Go Outside In The World, The Question Isn't Who Will Keep Me Safe From Him?" "no?" "no. It's Who Will Keep Him Safe From Me?

None Of This Is Truly Happening," He Said To Shadow. He Sounded Miserable. "it's All In Your Head. Best Not To Think Of It.

The Great Thing About Batman And Superman, In Truth, Is That They Are Literally Transcendent. They Are Better Than Most Of The Stories They Are In.

If He Didn't Care About You, You Couldn't Upset Him.

I Was A Scholarship Minor Public School Day Boy At Ardingly College And Later Whitgift School. Then, Straight Into Work As A Journalist - A Wonderful Thing For A Writer.

So Many Things To See, People To Do.

Actually I Didn't Shoot A Man In Reno Just To Watch Him Die, But He Could Tell I Was Extremely Cross.

I Hope You Will Have A Wonderful Year, That You'll Dream Dangerously And Outrageously, That You'll Make Something That Didn't Exist Before You Made It, That You Will Be Loved And That You Will Be Liked, And That You Will Have People To Love And To Like In Return. And, Most Importantly (because I Think There Should Be More Kindness And More Wisdom In The World Right Now), That You Will, When You Need To Be, Be Wise, And That You Will Always Be Kind.

I Like Horror, But I Tend To Like It As Seasoning. I'd Get Very Bored If I Was Told I Had To Write A Horror Novel. I'd Love To Write A Novel With Horror Elements, But Too Much, And It Doesn't Taste Of Anything Else.

Is The Chemical Aftertaste The Reason Why People Eat Hot Dogs, Or Is It Some Kind Of Bonus?

What Are These Fundamental Principles, If They Are Not Atoms?" "stories. And They Give Me Hope.

Because, If One Is Writing Novels Today, Concentrating On The Beauty Of The Prose Is Right Up There With Concentrating On Your Semi-colons, For Wasted Effort.

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.

Nobody Looks Like What They Really Are On The Inside. You Don’t. I Don’t. People Are Much More Complicated Than That. It’s True Of Everybody.

The View Changes From Where You Are Standing. Words Can Wound, And Wounds Can Heal. All Of These Things Are True.

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

When Angels Go Bad They Are Worse Than Anyone Else. Remember Lucifer Used To Be An Angel.

The Real Problem With Stories - If You Keep Them Going Long Enough, They Always End In Death.

Let Her Tell Stories And Dance In The Rain, Somersault, Tumble And Run, Her Joys Must Be High As Her Sorrows Are Deep, Let Her Grow Like A Weed In The Sun.

The World Is Always Ending, For Someone.

You’re Alive. That Means You Have Infinite Potential. You Can Do Anything, Make Anything, Dream Anything.

For Tea She Went Down To See Misses Spink And Forcible. She Had Three Digestive Biscuits, A Glass Of Limeade, And A Cup Of Weak Tea. The Limeade Was Very Interesting. It Didn't Taste Anything Like Limes. It Tasted Bright Green And Vaguely Chemical. Coraline Liked It Enormously. She Wished They Had It At Home. "how Are Your Dear Mother And Father?" Asked Miss Spink. "missing," Said Coraline. "i Haven't Seen Either Of Them Since Yesterday. I'm On My Own. I Think I've Probably Become A Single Child Family.

He's Out Here, Somewhere, And He Wants You Dead,' She Said. 'him As Killed Your Family. Us In The Graveyard, We Wants You To Stay Alive. We Wants You To Surprise Us And Disappoint Us And Impress Us And Amaze Us. Come Home, Bod.

I Don't Just Randomly Kill People... I Kill People When It's Funny.

He Had Read Books, Newspapers And Magazines. He Knew That If You Ran Away You Sometimes Met Bad People Who Did Bad Things To You; But He Had Also Read Fairy Tales, So He Knew That There Were Kind People Out There, Side By Side With The Monsters.

We Do Not Always Remember The Things That Do No Credit To Us. We Justify Them, Cover Them In Bright Lies Or With The Thick Dust Of Forgetfulness. All Of The Things That Shadow Had Done In His Life Of Which He Was Not Proud, All The Things He Wished He Had Done Otherwise Or Left Undone, Came At Him Then In A Swirling Storm Of Guilt And Regret And Shame, And He Had Nowhere To Hide From Them. He Was As Naked And As Open As A Corpse On A Table, And Dark Anubis The Jackal God Was His Prosector And His Prosecutor And His Persecutor.

Anywhere That I Can't Check My Email Is A Good Place To Write!

We Have An Obligation To Imagine. It Is Easy To Pretend That Nobody Can Change Anything, That We Are In A World In Which Society Is Huge And The Individual Is Less Than Nothing: An Atom In A Wall, A Grain Of Rice In A Rice Field. But The Truth Is, Individuals Change Their World Over And Over, Individuals Make The Future, And They Do It By Imagining That Things Can Be Different.

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

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.

What's It Like Then?" Asked Old Bailey. "being Dead?" The Marquis Sighed. And Then He Twisted His Lips Up Into A Smile, And With A Glitter Of His Old Self, He Replied, "live Long Enough, Old Bailey, And You Can Find Out For Yourself.

And There Never Was An Apple, In Adam's Opinion, That Wasn't Worth The Trouble You Got Into For Eating It.

It Was A Perfectly Normal Gerbil. It Appeared To Be Living In An Exciting Construction Of Cylinders, Spheres And Treadmills, Such As The Spanish Inquisition Would Have Devised If They'd Had Access To A Plastics Molding Press.

Perfectly Normal

When I Was Very Young, I Would Occasionally Stick 'f****' Where I Knew Something Contentious Might Happen So That The Editor Could Remove The Word 'f***' Very Proudly And Leave Whatever Else Was Around It.

I Think I've Got Fear Down, But How Do I Take It All The Way Up To Terror?

I Don't Know If Proud Is The Right Word, But I Am Somebody Who Does Not, On The Whole, Have The Highest Regard For My Own Stuff In That When I Look All I Get To See Are The Flaws.

I Can Believe Things That Are True And Things That Aren't True And I Can Believe Things Where Nobody Knows If They're True Or Not.

It Is Going To Take More Than Just A Couple Of Good-hearted Souls To Raise This Child. It Will Take A Graveyard.

In Comics, Collaboration Saves Your Life. How Well You Can Work With An Artist, A Colorist, A Letterer, Is How Good Your Comic Is.

Daisy Looked Up At Him With The Kind Of Expression That Jesus Might Have Given Someone Who Had Just Explained That He Was Probably Allergic To Bread And Fishes, So Could He Possibly Do Him A Quick Chicken Salad.

Does It Make You Feel Big To Make A Little Boy Cry?

But There Was A Kitten On My Pillow, And It Was Purring In My Face And Vibrating Gently With Every Purr, And, Very Soon, I Slept.

The Sky Had Never Seemed So Sky; The World Had Never Seemed So World.

As A Teenager I Wrote To R.a. Lafferty. And He Responded, Too, With Letters That Were Like R.a. Lafferty Short Stories, Filled With Elliptical Answers To Straight Questions And Simple Answers To Complicated Ones.

Be Proud Of Your Mistakes. Well, Proud May Not Be Exactly The Right Word, But Respect Them, Treasure Them, Be Kind To Them, Learn From Them. And, More Than That, And More Important Than That, Make Them. Make Mistakes. Make Great Mistakes, Make Wonderful Mistakes, Make Glorious Mistakes. Better To Make A Hundred Mistakes Than To Stare At A Blank Piece Of Paper Too Scared To Do Anything Wrong.

What's Your Name,' Coraline Asked The Cat. 'look, I'm Coraline. Okay?' 'cats Don't Have Names,' It Said. 'no?' Said Coraline. 'no,' Said The Cat. 'now You People Have Names. That's Because You Don't Know Who You Are. We Know Who We Are, So We Don't Need Names.

Las Vegas Has Become A Child's Picture-book Dream Of A City -- Here A Storybook Castle, There A Sphinx-flanked Black Pyramid Beaming White Light Into The Darkness As A Landing Beam For Ufos, And Everywhere Neon Oracles And Twisting Screens Predict Happiness And Good Fortune, Announce Singers And Comedians And Magicians In Residence Or On Their Way, And The Lights Always Flash And Beckon And Call.

Some People Have Great Ideas Maybe Once Or Twice In Their Life, And Then They Discover Electricity Or Fire Or Outer Space Or Something. I Mean, The Kind Of Brilliant Ideas That Change The Whole World. Some People Never Have Them At All... I Get Them Two Or Three Times A Week.

Writing Imaginative Tales For The Young Is Like Sending Coals To Newcastle. For Coals.

London Grew Into Something Huge And Contradictory. It Was A Good Place, And A Fine City, But There Is A Price To Be Paid For All Good Places, And A Price That All Good Places Have To Pay.

Anything That Keeps You Happy And Writing Is Part Of My Writing Ritual: I Like Music, So I Tend To Have It Playing In The Background. But If I'm Interested, I Can Write In An Airport Waiting Areas.

I Already Killed You Once Today, What Does It Take To Teach Some People?

Time Is Fluid Here', Said The Demon.

I Told You I Would Tell You My Names. This Is What They Call Me. I'm Called Glad-of-war, Grim, Raider, And Third. I Am One-eyed. I Am Called Highest, And True-guesser. I Am Grimnir, And I Am The Hooded One. I Am All-father, And I Am Gondlir Wand-bearer. I Have As Many Names As There Are Winds, As Many Titles As There Are Ways To Die. My Ravens Are Huginn And Muninn, Thought And Memory; My Wolves Are Freki And Geri; My Horse Is The Gallows.

Note For Americans And Other Aliens: Milton Keynes Is A New City Approximately Halfway Between London And Birmingham. It Was Built To Be Modern, Efficient, Healthy, And, All In All, A Pleasant Place To Live. Many Britons Find This Amusing.

Call No Man Happy, Said Shadow, Until He Is Dead

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 Nowhere They Could Have Gone And They Went There Anyway.

I Was Not So Old That I Would Deny My Own Senses.

After A While It Sort Of Began To Rain, Which Is To Say That It Was The Kind Of Rain That Never Comes To A Decision About Whether It's Actually Raining Or Not. Driving In It, You Would Never Have Been Certain Whether Or Not To Turn On Your Wipers.

Everything Has To Be Intrinsic Plot-wise In The Same Way, To Use The Linda Williams Analogy But To Move It On A Bit, As Musicals - In Old Musicals, Like In An Old Cole Porter Musical, You Get The Action, Then They Do A Song, Which Reflects A Moment - Everything Stops While That Is Being Sung - And Then You Restart. These Days In Most Musicals, The Plot Keeps Moving Through The Song. I Think It Would Be Nice If Someone Constructed Some Pornography Where The Sex Continues To Propel You Through The Story.

I Sat In The Dark And Thought: There’s No Big Apocalypse. Just An Endless Procession Of Little Ones.

As Far As I'm Concerned, The Entire Reason For Becoming A Writer Is Not Having To Get Up In The Morning.

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

We Save Our Lives In Such Unlikely Ways.

The Current Total Of Countries In The World With First Amendments Is One. You Have Guaranteed Freedom Of Speech. Other Countries Don't Have That.

Freedom Of Speech

All Around Me Darkness Gathers, Fading Is The Sun That Shone, We Must Speak Of Other Matters, You Can Be Me When I'm Gone Flowers Gathered In The Morning, Afternoon They Blossom On, Still Are Withered In The Evening, You Can Be Me When I'm Gone.

Now Coraline," Said Miss Spink, "what's Your Name?" "coraline," Said Coraline. "and We Don't Know Each Other, Do We?" Coraline Looked At The Thin Young Woman With Black Button Eyes And Shook Her Head Slowly.

This Is A Book For Every Fiddler Who Has Realized Halfway Through Playing An Ancient Scottish Air That The Ramones "i Wanna Be Sedated" Is What Folk Music Is Really All About, And Gone Straight Into It.

Doing Fine, Thank You, I Would Say, Never Knowing How To Talk About What I Do. If I Could Talk About It, I Would Not Have To Do It. I Make Art, Sometimes I Make True Art, And Sometimes It Fills The Empty Places In My Heart. Some Of Them. Not All.

They Were Having An Argument As Old And Comfortable As An Armchair, The Kind Of Argument That No One Ever Really Wins Or Loses But Which Can Go On Forever, If Both Parties Are Willing.

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

I Watch With Envious Eyes And Mind, The Single-souled Who Dare Not Feel The Wind That Blows Beyond The Moon, Who Do Not Hear The Fairy Reel

I Guess It's Just Another One Of Life's Little Mysteries." "i'm Tired Of Mysteries." "yeah? I Think They Add A Kind Of Zest To The World. Like Salt In A Stew.

Really, He Thought, If You Couldn't Trust A Poet To Offer Sensible Advice, Who Could You Trust?

Hunchbacks Danced At My Wedding For Luck. It's A Thing You Don't See Nowadays.

We Have The Right, And The Obligation, To Tell Old Stories In Our Own Ways, Because They Are Our Stories.

Nobody Actually Looks Like What They Really Are On The Inside.

I Was Always So Relieved That Anyone Wants To Publish Anything I've Written.

If You Can't Eat It, Drink It, Smoke It, Or Snort It... Then F*ck It!

A Novel Seemed The Easiest Way To Get What I Had Had In My Head Into The Inside Of Other People's Heads. Books Are Good That Way.

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 Believe In Absolute Honesty And Sensible Social Lies.

Peas Baffled Me. I Could Not Understand Why Grown-ups Would Take Things That Tasted So Good Raw, And Then Put Them In Tins, And Make Them Revolting.

She Decides To Make A List Of The Things That Make Her Happy. She Writes 'plum-blossom' At The Top Of A Piece Of Paper. Then She Stares At The Paper, Unable To Think Of Anything Else. Eventually It Begins To Get Dark.

You're No Help," He Told The Lime. This Was Unfair. It Was Only A Lime; There Was Nothing Special About It At All. It Was Doing The Best It Could.

The Magic Of Comics Is That There Are Three People Involved In Any Comic. There's Whoever's Writing It And Whoever's Drawing It. And Then There's Whoever's Reading It Because They Are Creating The Movement. They Are Creating The Illusion Of Time Passing.

Stories Are The Things That Allow Us To Persuade Each Other That We're Human.

There Are People You Do Not Want To Upset In The World - The Politically Disenfranchized Who Feel They Have Nothing To Lose, Those Who Feel That The Time Has Come For Revolution ... Then Out On The Edges Beyond Any Of Those Are Science Fiction Fans Whose Favorite Show Has Been Canceled In An Untimely Way.

Bod Said, 'i Want To See Life. I Want To Hold It In My Hands. I Want To Leave A Footprint On The Sand Of A Desert Island. I Want To Play Football With People. I Want,' He Said, And Then He Paused And He Thought. 'i Want Everything.

It Seems Like Every Time I Agree To Work With A Video Game Company They Go Out Of Business. I Stopped Because I Was Starting To Feel Guilty.

He Stared Up At The Stars, And It Seemed To Him Then That They Were Dancers, Stately And Graceful, Performing A Dance Almost Infinite In Its Complexity. He Imagined He Could See The Very Faces Of The Stars; Pale, They Were, And Smiling Gently, As If They Had Spent So Much Time Above The World, Watching The Scrambling And The Joy And The Pain Of The People Below Them, That They Could Not Help Being Amused Every Time Another Little Human Believed Itself The Center Of Its World, As Each Of Us Does.

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

I Don't Think About Age Groups When I Write, Although I Think If I Know I'm Writing For Children I'll Be A Bit More Ambitious, And Think More About Every Word, Because I Know That They Pay Closer Attention When They Read Than Adults Do.

Bod Shrugged. "so?" He Said. "it's Only Death. I Mean, All Of My Best Friends Are Dead.

An Angel Who Did Not So Much Fall As Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

It Stared At Them, And It Paused For A Hundred Years, Which Transpired In A Dozen Heart Beats.

Whatever It Is You're Scared Of Doing, Do It.

There's Definitely A Feeling With A Short Story That It's Pure Story Telling. You're Not Really Worried About Theme. You're Not Going To Stay With The Characters Long Enough To Live Your Life With Them. And You Have Different Kinds Of Relationships With Them.

The Real World Has No Obligation To Be Convincing, So It Throws Up Some Very Weird Moments Sometimes.

Because If You Don't Stand Up For The Stuff You Don't Like, When They Come For The Stuff You Do Like, You've Already Lost.

Freedom Of Speech

The Magic And The Danger Of Fiction Is This: It Allows Us To See Through Other Eyes. It Takes Us To Places We Have Never Been, Allows Us To Care About, Worry About, Laugh With, And Cry For People Who Do Not, Outside Of The Story, Exist. There Are People Who Think That Things That Happen In Fiction Do Not Really Happen. These People Are Wrong.

I Believe That All Men Are Just Overgrown Boys With Deep Problems Communicating.

You Don't Have To Test Everything To Destruction Just To See If You Made It Right.

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