Background Image

...

What Would Be The Fun In Doing Things You Know Are Going To Work?

-Neil Gaiman

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

What Would Be The

Neil Gaiman

...

What Would Be The Fun In Doing Things You Know Are Going To Work?

Views: 50109

Topic

More From Neil Gaiman

I Am Frightened Of Nothing." "nothing?" "nothing." "are You Extremely Frightened Of Nothing?" "absolutely Terrified Of It." "i Have Nothing In My Pockets. Would You Like To See It?" "no, I Most Definitely Would Not.

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.

I Suspect That Most Authors Don't Really Want Criticism, Not Even Constructive Criticism. They Want Straight-out, Unabashed, Unashamed, Fulsome, Informed, Naked Praise, Arriving By The Shipload Every Fifteen Minutes Or So.

We'll Win, Of Course," He Said. "you Don't Want That," Said The Demon. "why Not, Pray?“ “listen," Said Crowley Desperately, "how Many Musicians Do You Think Your Side Have Got, Eh? First Grade, I Mean." Aziraphale Looked Taken Aback. "well, I Should Think-" He Began. "two," Said Crowley. "elgar And Liszt. That's All. We've Got The Rest. Beethoven, Brahms, All The Bachs, Mozart, The Lot. Can You Imagine Eternity With Elgar?

I Think Hell Is Something You Carry Around With You, Not Somewhere You Go.

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

I Fell For Her Like A Suicide From A Bridge.

There Was Nowhere They Could Have Gone And They Went There Anyway.

Lives Are Snowflakes - Unique In Detail, Forming Patterns We Have Seen Before, But As Like One Another As Peas In A Pod (and Have You Ever Looked At Peas In A Pod? I Mean, Really Looked At Them? There's Not A Chance You'd Mistake One For Another, After A Minute's Close Inspection.)

He..." Richard Began. "the Marquis. Well, You Know, To Be Honest, He Seems A Little Bit Dodgy To Me." Door Stopped. The Steps Dead-ended In A Rough Brick Wall. "mm," She Agreed. "he's A Little Bit Dodgy In The Same Way That Rats Are A Little Bit Covered In Fur.

As A Kid I Would Get My Parents To Drop Me Off At My Local Library On Their Way To Work During The Summer Holidays And I Would Walk Home At Night. For Several Years I Read The Children's Library Until I Finished The Children's Library. Then I Moved Into The Adult Library And Slowly Worked My Way Through Them.

I Think Most Things Are Pretty Magical, And That It's Less A Matter Of Belief Than It Is One Of Just Stopping To Notice.

There Are Little Pockets Of Old Time In London, Where Things And Places Stay The Same, Like Bubble In Amber.

Pain Shared, My Brother, Is Pain Not Doubled But Halved. No Man Is An Island

Wherever You Go, You Take Yourself With You.

I'm More Or Less Happily Writing Chapter Six Of The Graveyard Book. I Say More Or Less As I'm At That Place Where I Hope That The Book Knows What It's Doing Because Right Now I Don't Have A Clue - I'm Writing One Scene After Another Like A Man Walking Through A Valley In Thick Fog, Just Able To See The Path A Little Way Ahead, But With No Idea Where It's Actually Going To Lead Him.

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

And He Waited. It Was Only For A Few Seconds, But It Felt Like A Small Forever.

Behind The Curtain's Mystic Fold The Glowing Future Lies Unrolled.

When You're Starting Off As A Young Writer, You Look At All The Stuff That's Gone Before And The Stuff That's Influenced You, And You Reach The Ladle Of Your Imagination Into This Bubbling Stew Pot Of All Of This Stuff, And You Pour It Out. And That's Where You Start From.

They Also Held That The Way To Salvation Was To Give Way To Lust And Temptation In All Things. And No Greater Percentage Of Them Turned Up Here Than Of Any Other Religion. Amusing, Isn't It?

I Felt Very Much Like A Hooker Who Had Just Been Told She Was A Lady Of The Evening.

The Cat Wrinkled Its Nose And Managed To Look Unimpressed. "calling Cats," It Confided, "tends To Be A Rather Overrated Activity. Might As Well Call A Whirlwind.

I Remember Making That Vow, The One Not To Forget. Not To Remember What Happened, But To Remember Who I Was And How I Felt.

I Really Like Being Able To Laugh At My Own Jokes.

Sometimes The Best Way To Learn Something Is By Doing It Wrong And Looking At What You Did.

What’s Your Name, Lad?” “newton. Newton Pulsifer.” “lucifer? What’s That You Say? Are Ye Of The Spawn Of Darkness, A Tempting Beguiling Creature From The Pit, Wanton Limbs Steaming From The Fleshpots Of Hades, In Tortured And Lubricious Thrall To Your Stygian And Hellish Masters?” “that’s Pulsifer,” Explained Newton. “with A P. I Don’t Know About The Other Stuff, But We Come From Surrey.” The Voice On The Phone Sounded Vaguely Disappointed.

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.

It Is Sometimes A Mistake To Climb. It Is Always A Mistake To Never Make The Attempt.

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

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.

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

Thought Provoking

Tools, Of Course, Can Be The Subtlest Of Traps.

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.

The Important Thing To Understand About American History, Wrote Mr. Ibis, In His Leather-bound Journal, Is That It Is Fictional, A Charcoal-sketched Simplicity For The Children, Or The Easily Bored.

I Lived In Books More Than I Lived Anywhere Else.

This Is The Only Country In The World, That Worries About What It Is. The Rest Of Them Know What They Are. No One Ever Needs To Go Searching For The Heart Of Norway. Or Looks For The Soul Of Mozambique. They Know What They Are.

I Couldn't Get You To The Ocean, But There Was Nothing Stopping Me Bringing The Ocean To You.

For Me, I Would Rather Read A Good Book, From A Contented Author. I Don't Really Care What It Takes To Produce That.

A Short Story Is The Ultimate Close-up Magic Trick -- A Couple Of Thousand Words To Take You Around The Universe Or Break Your Heart.

You're A Poem?' I Repeated. She Chewed Her Lower Lip. 'if You Want. I Am A Poem, Or I Am A Pattern, Or A Race Of People Whose Whose World Was Swallowed By The Sea.' 'isn't It Hard To Be Three Things At The Same Time?' 'what's Your Name?' 'enn.' 'so You Are Enn,' She Said. 'and You Are A Male. And You Are A Biped. Is It Hard To Be Three Things At The Same Time?

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.

The Thin Girl Was Gulping Down One Of Richard's Bananas In What Was, Richard Reflected, The Least Erotic Display Of Banana-eating He Had Ever Seen.

Everybody Has A Secret World Inside Of Them. I Mean Everybody. All Of The People In The Whole World, I Mean Everybody — No Matter How Dull And Boring They Are On The Outside. Inside Them They've All Got Unimaginable, Magnificent, Wonderful, Stupid, Amazing Worlds... Not Just One World. Hundreds Of Them. Thousands, Maybe.

It's Not Sipping Wine. It's A Mourning Wine. You Drain It. Like This.

And, Too Ignorant To Be Scared, Too Young To Be Awed, Tristan Thorn Traveled Beyond The Fields We Know.

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.

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

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.

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.

In Every Way That Counted, I Was Dead. Inside Somewhere Maybe I Was Screaming And Weeping And Howling Like An Animal, But That Was Another Person Deep Inside, Another Person Who Had No Access To The Lips And Face And Mouth And Head, So On The Surface I Just Shrugged And Smile And Kept Moving. If I Could Have Physically Passed Away, Just Let It All Go, Like That, Without Doing Anything, Stepped Out Of Life As Easily As Walking Through A Door I Would Have Done. But I Was Going To Sleep At Night And Waking In The Morning, Disappointed To Be There And Resigned To Existence.

If There's One Thing That A Study Of History Has Taught Us, It Is That Things Can Always Get Worse.

Tristan And Yvaine Were Happy Together. Not Forever-after, For Time, The Thief, Eventually Takes All Things Into His Dusty Storehouse, But They Were Happy, As These Things Go, For A Long While

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

Twitter Is Great And It's Glorious And It's Easy, But If Somebody Comes Up With Something Kind Of Like Twitter Tomorrow, That's Better Or Smarter Or More Useful, In Three Weeks Time, Twitter Could More Or Less Be History Because That's How Fast Things Go.

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.

A Life That Is, Like Any Other, Unlike Any Other.

What Need, Dunstan Wondered, Could Someone Have Of The Storm-filled Eggshells?

I Hope That This Year, You Make Mistakes. If You Do, Then It Means You Have Tried, Learned, Lived, Pushed Yourself, Changed You And Your World, And Most Importantly, You've Done Something.

He Tried To Listen To The Conversations Going On At The Table And He Found That He Could No Longer Concentrate On What Anyone Was Saying And Which Was Worse That He Was Not Interested In Any Of What He Was Able To Hear.

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.

Books Make Great Gifts Because They Have Whole Worlds Inside Of Them. And It's Much Cheaper To Buy Somebody A Book Than It Is To Buy Them The Whole World!

Time Is Fluid Here', Said The Demon.

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

I Always Say That If You're A Novelist, The Challenge Is Not Writing What You Think Ought To Happen, But Trying In Some Way To Write What Did Happen In A World That Doesn't Necessarily Exist.

They Were Not My Friends, After All. They Were Just The People I Went To School With.

I Saw The World I Had Walked Since My Birth And I Understood How Fragile It Was, That The Reality Was A Thin Layer Of Icing On A Great Dark Birthday Cake Writhing With Grubs And Nightmares And Hunger.

It Seemed To Coraline That It Was Crouching, And Staring Down At Her, As If It Were Not Really A House But Only The Idea Of A House—and The Person Who Had Had The Idea, She Was Certain, Was Not A Good Person.

I Hope That In This Year To Come, You Make Mistakes. Because If You Are Making Mistakes...you're Doing Something.

I Don't Want Whatever I Want. Nobody Does. Not Really. What Kind Of Fun Would It Be If I Just Got Everything I Ever Wanted Just Like That, And It Didn't Mean Anything? What Then?

Books Are Defensive, Not Offensive (unless You're The Puzzled Adult Trying To Make The Kid With The Book Interact).

October Knew, Of Course, That The Action Of Turning A Page, Of Ending A Chapter Or Of Shutting A Book, Did Not End A Tale. Having Admitted That, He Would Also Avow That Happy Endings Were Never Difficult To Find: "it Is Simply A Matter," He Explained To April, "of Finding A Sunny Place In A Garden, Where The Light Is Golden And The Grass Is Soft; Somewhere To Rest, To Stop Reading, And To Be Content.

Nobody Gets Through Life Without Losing A Few Things On The Way.

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

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

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.

So," He Asked. "how's Death?" "hard," She Said. "it Just Keeps Going.

Something Told Him That Something Was Coming To An End. Not The World, Exactly. Just The Summer. There Would Be Other Summers, But There Would Never Be One Like This. Ever Again.

China Was The Most Optimistic Place I'd Ever Been. Everybody I Met Was Pretty Much Convinced That Their Children Would Have It Better Than Their Parents Had Had It. It Was Like Being In America In The 1950's, With This Deep Optimism About The Future Because Everything Was Getting Better, And That Fascinated Me.

The Only Ones Who Ever Come Here From Your Lands Are The Minstrels, And The Lovers, And The Mad. And You Don't Look Like Much Of A Minstrel, And You're— Pardon Me For Saying So Lad, But It's True— Ordinary As Cheese Crumbs. So It's Love If You Ask Me.

Nobody Will Ever Hurt Her. She’ll Just Smile Her Faint Vague Wonderful Smile And Walk Away.

You Can't Make Me Love You.

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.

The Converse Held Reassuringly True: Daylight Was Safe. Daylight Was Always Safe.

Books Are Special, Books Are The Way We Talk To Generations That Have Not Turned Up Yet. The Fact That We Can Actually, Essentially Communicate With The People In Ancient Egypt, People In Rome And Greece, People In Ancient Britain, People In New York In The 1920s Who Can Communicate To Us And Change The Way We Think, And Change The Things That We Believe. I Think That Books Are Special. Books Are Sacred. And I Think That When You Are Selling Books, You Have To Remember That In All The Profits And Loss, In All Of That, You Are Treading On Sacred Ground.

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.

That's Sexism, That Is. Going Around Giving People Girly Presents Just Because They're A Girl.

Death’s A Funny Thing. I Used To Think It Was A Big, Sudden Thing, Like A Huge Owl That Would Swoop Down Out Of The Night And Carry You Off. I Don’t Anymore. I Think It’s A Slow Thing. Like A Thief Who Comes To Your House Day After Day, Taking A Little Thing Here And A Little Thing There, And One Day You Walk Round Your House And There’s Nothing There To Keep You, Nothing To Make You Want To Stay. And Then You Lie Down And Shut Up Forever. Lots Of Little Deaths Until The Last Big One.

I Want To Write A Play. I'd Like To Do An Original Musical. I Should Probably Put Together A Poetry Collection.

Dreams Are Hopes, And Echoes Of Hope.

I'm One Of Those Writers Who Tends To Be Really Good At Making Outlines And Sticking To Them. I'm Very Good At Doing That, But I Don't Like It. It Sort Of Takes A Lot Of The Fun Out.

Writers Are Liars My Dear, Surely You Know That By Now?

There's An Expression, Deja Vu, That Means That You Feel Like You've Been Somewhere Before, That You've Somehow Already Dreamed It Or Experienced It In Your Mind.

That Which Is Dreamed Can Never Be Lost, Can Never Be Undreamed.

Life And Death Are Different Sides Of The Same Coin.

You Think You're Being Given All Of These Things: Phones That Can Communicate With Other Devices, Car Service That's Better Than A Taxi, All Of These Amazing Things That Are Available To You At Any Time. It Isn't Until You've Swum Across The River That You Can Start To See The Negative Aspects Of It All.

To Be A Good Writer... Read A Lot And Write Every Day.

You Can't Trust Other People. If It's Important, You Have To Do It Yourself.

Anyone Who Believes What A Cat Tells Him Deserves All He Gets.

Lies And Half-truths Fall Like Snow, Covering The Things That I Remember, The Things I Saw. A Landscape, Unrecognizable After A Snowfall; That Is That She Has Made Of My Life.

Why Are We Talking About This Good And Evil? They're Just Names For Sides. We Know That.

When I Was About Ten My Favourite Article In The Huge And Mouldering Encyclopedia Britannica We Owned (the Ninth Edition) Was The One On Lycanthropy. (yes, I Had A Favourite 1890s Britannica Article When I Was Ten. I Am Now Aware This Is Not Entirely Usual.)

Encyclopedia Britannica

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

Shadow Had Heard Too Many People Telling Each Other Not To Repress Their Feelings, To Let Their Emotions Out, Let The Pain Go. Shadow Thought There Was A Lot To Be Said For Bottling Up Emotions. If You Did It Long Enough And Deep Enough, He Suspected, Pretty Soon You Wouldn't Feel Anything At All.

You're Always You, And That Don't Change, And You're Always Changing, And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

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

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.

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.

Do You Know Why I Stopped Being Delight, My Brother? I Do. There Are Things Not In Your Book. There Are Paths Outside This Garden.

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.

It's Harder To Pick And Choose When You're Dead. It's Like A Photograph, You Know. It Doesn't Matter As Much.

We All Not Only Could Know Everything. We Do. We Just Tell Ourselves We Don't To Make It All Bearable.

I Know Not Whether You Came To Me Or I To You. Not Whether It Was A Dream, Asleep Or Awake. I Am Lost In The Darkness Of A Downcast Heart. Dream Or Reality. Let It Be Decided Tonight.

Leave No Stone Unturned. Deeply Explore The Beauty Of Your Life.

Hey, That's Life, Flick It Off If You Can't Take A Joke.

I'm A Stranger," Pointed Out Bod. "you're Not," She Said, Definitely. "you're A Little Boy." And Then She Said, "and You're My Friend. So You Can't Be A Stranger.

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.

Not Gay, Just Never Met The Right Woman.

Writing Fiction Is Not A Profession That Leaves One Well-disposed Toward Reading Fiction. One Starts Out Loving Books And Stories, And Then One Becomes Jaded And Increasingly Hard To Please. I Read Less And Less Fiction These Days, Finding The Buzz And The Joy I Used To Get From Fiction In Ever Stranger Works Of Non-fiction, Or Poetry.

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.

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.

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.

When You Die, They Can Make You Into Diamonds Now. It’s Scientific. That’s How I Want To Be Remembered. I Want To Shine.

Even Nothing Cannot Last Forever.

As I Wouldn't Wear A Costume, I Couldn't Imagine Him Wanting To Wear One. And Seeing That The Greater Part Of My Wardrobe Is Black (it's A Sensible Colour. It Goes With Anything. Well, Anything Black)[...].

It Used To Be Thought That The Events That Changed The World Were Things Like Big Bombs, Maniac Politicians, Huge Earthquakes, Or Vast Population Movements, But It Has Now Been Realized That This Is A Very Old-fashioned View Held By People Totally Out Of Touch With Modern Thought. The Things That Really Change The World, According To Chaos Theory, Are The Tiny Things. A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings In The Amazonian Jungle, And Subsequently A Storm Ravages Half Of Europe.

Loyalty Was A Great Thing, But No Lieutenants Should Be Forced To Choose Between Their Leader And A Circus With Elephants.

He Wondered Whether Home Was A Thing That Happened To A Place After A While, Or If It Was Something That You Found In The End, If You Simply Walked And Waited And Willed It Long Enough.

I Lay On The Bed And Lost Myself In Stories. I Liked That. Books Were Safer Than Other People Anyways.

I Learned To Write By Writing.

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 Must Confess, I Have Always Wondered What Lay Beyond Life, My Dear. Yeah, Everybody Wonders. And Sooner Or Later Everybody Gets To Find Out.

Death And Famine And War And Pollution Continued Biking Towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, And Really Cool People Travelled With Them.

He Was No Longer Scared Of What Tomorrow Might Bring Because Yesterday Has Brought It.

"where Do You Get Your Ideas?" That's The One Question I'm Genuinely Sick Of Being Asked, And Also Genuinely Fascinated By. What Fascinates Me Is Not That People Ask The Question, But What Kind Of Answer Are They Really Looking For? Because If I Tell Them The Truth, Which Is "i Make Them Up," They Seem Very Disappointed. They Want To Know About The Trek I Do Once A Year To The Mountain.

You Know The Best Thing About Aeroplanes? Apart From The Peanuts In Little Silver Bags, I Mean. It's Looking Out Of The Windows At The Clouds And Thinking Maybe I Could Go Walking In There. Maybe It's A Special Place Where Everything's Okay. Sometimes I Do Go Walking In The Clouds But It's Just Cold And Wet And Empty. But When You Look Out Of A Plane It's A Special World... And I Like It.

I Personally Have A Great Deal Of Respect For Readers. I Have A Great Deal Of Respect For The Human Race. I Think Most People Can Tell The Difference Between Fiction And Fact. I Think That The Action Of Writing About Something Does Not Condone It. The Best Thing I Can Ever Hope To Do Is Provide Good Questions, And I Think I Do That. I Hope I Do.

Sometimes The Way To Do What You Hope To Do Will Be Clear Cut, And Sometimes It Will Be Almost Impossible To Decide Whether Or Not You Are Doing The Correct Thing, Because You'll Have To Balance Your Goals And Hopes With Feeding Yourself, Paying Debts, Finding Work, Settling For What You Can Get.

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

You Don't Pass Or Fail At Being A Person, Dear.

People Talk About Books That Write Themselves, And It's A Lie. Books Don't Write Themselves. It Takes Thought And Research And Backache And Notes And More Time And More Work Than You'd Believe.

Remember: When People Tell You Something’s Wrong Or Doesn’t Work For Them, They Are Almost Always Right. When They Tell You Exactly What They Think Is Wrong And How To Fix It, They Are Almost Always Wrong.

Science Is A Way Of Talking About The Universe In Words That Bind It To A Common Reality. Magic Is A Method Of Talking To The Universe In Words That It Cannot Ignore. The Two Are Rarely Compatible.

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

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.

She Was The Storm, She Was The Lightning, She Was The Adult World With All Its Power And All Its Secrets And All Its Foolish Casual Cruelty.

My Wife, Amanda, Is Terribly Good At Warping Reality. She Is Like A Bowling Ball On A Rubber Sheet, And You Find Yourself Living In Her Universe, Doing Things That Are Completely Unexpected Or Unimaginable For You, But You Blink And You're Up On A Stage Singing, Or Wearing A Peculiar Wig, Or Writing A Book Filled With Feelings And Emotion, Or Doing Something Equally As Unlikely.

I'd Love To Write Some Porn, But I Don't Know If I Have The Right Engines. When I Was A Young Man And I Was Tempted To Write Porn, Imaginary Parents Would Appear Over My Shoulder And Read What I Was Writing; Just About The Point That I Managed To Banish The Imaginary Parents, Real Children Would Lean Over My Shoulder And Read What I Was Writing.

My Guiltiest Pleasure Is Harry Stephen Keeler. He May Have Been The Greatest Bad Writer America Has Ever Produced. Or Perhaps The Worst Great Writer. I Do Not Know. There Are Few Faults You Can Accuse Him Of That He Is Not Guilty Of. But I Love Him.

In Many Ways, It Was Much, Much Harder To Get The First Book Contract. The Hardest Thing Probably Overall Has Been Learning Not To Trust People, Publicists And So Forth, Implicitly.

Normally, In Anything I Do, I'm Fairly Miserable. I Do It, And I Get Grumpy Because There Is A Huge, Vast Gulf, This Aching Disparity, Between The Platonic Ideal Of The Project That Was Living In My Head, And The Small, Sad, Wizened, Shaking, Squeaking Thing That I Actually Produce.

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.

She Really Was Pretty, For A Grown-up Person, But When You Are Seven, Beauty Is An Abstraction, Not An Imperative. I Wonder What I Would Have Done If She Had Smiled At Me Like That Now: Whether I Would Have Handed My Mind Or My Heart Or My Identify To Her For The Asking, As My Father Did.

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

There Are A Hundred Things She Has Tried To Chase Away The Things She Won't Remember And That She Can't Even Let Herself Think About Because That's When The Birds Scream And The Worms Crawl And Somewhere In Her Mind It's Always Raining A Slow Endless Drizzle.

The World Always Seems Brighter When You've Just Made Something That Wasn't There Before.

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.

My Parents Would Frisk Me Before Family Events, And Find The Book, And Lock It In The Car. And Then Be Disappointed Where, Somewhere At The Event, I Would Find A Book And Sit Under A Table Where Nobody Could Get Me And Go Back Into Book Land.

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.

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

When I Was Young, I Was Reading Anything And Anything I Could Lay My Hands On. I Was A Veracious-to-the-point-of-insane Reader.

If People Are Standing Up There Saying, My Football Team Just Won With Help From God, Then Obviously God Just Pissed Over The Other Team.

Delirium: 'what's The Name Of The Word For The Precise Moment When You Realize That You've Actually Forgotten How It Felt To Make Love To Somebody You Really Liked A Long Time Ago?' Dream: 'there Isn't One.' Delirium: 'oh. I Thought Maybe There Was.'

The Short Story Is Still Like The Novel's Wayward Younger Brother, We Know That It's Not Respectable - But I Think That Can Also Add To The Glory Of It.

The World Is Always Ending, And The End Is Always Being Averted, By Love Or Foolishness Or Just Plain Old Dumb Luck.

I Think Of Myself As A Very Lazy Author.

I Have A Really High Tolerance Level For Twits. I Really Do.

Is There Any Person In The World Who Does Not Dream? Who Does Not Contain Within Them Worlds Unimagined?

Nobody's Seen Jesus In Years.

Charitably... I Think... Sometimes, Perhaps, One Must Change Or Die. And, In The End, There Were, Perhaps, Limits To How Much He Could Let Himself Change.

Nothin’ Wrong With Witchfinding. I’d Like To Be A Witchfinder. It’s Just, Well, You’ve Got To Take It In Turns. Today We’ll Go Out Witchfinding, An’ Tomorrow We Could Hide, An’ It’d Be The Witches’ Turn To Find Us.

I Thought About Moving South, About Continuing To Run, Continuing To Pretend I Was Alive. But It Was, I Knew Now, Much Too Late For That. There Are Doors, After All, Between The Living And The Dead, And They Swing In Both Directions.

The Ideas Aren't That Important. Really They Aren't. Everyone's Got An Idea For A Book, A Movie, A Story, A Tv Series.

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

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

As For Thinking Time Versus Writing Time, Well, That's Up To You. But - And I Wish It Were Otherwise - Books Don't Get Written By Thinking About Them, They Get Written By Writing Them. And That's When You Make Discoveries About What You're Writing. That's When You Get The Happy Accidents.

You Musn’t Be Afraid Of The Dark.’ ‘i’m Not,’ Said Shadow. ‘i’m Afraid Of The People In The Dark.

I Kept Starting 'anansi Boys' As A Movie And Stopping, And Eventually Wrote The Novel And Was Happy.

Fiction Allows Us To Slide Into These Other Heads, These Other Places, And Look Out Through Other Eyes. And Then In The Tale We Stop Before We Die, Or We Die Vicariously And Unharmed, And In The World Beyond The Tale We Turn The Page Or Close The Book, And We Resume Our Lives.

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

Talk Is Free But The Wise Man Chooses When To Spend His Words.

The Only Advice I Can Give You Is What You're Telling Yourself. Only, Maybe You're Too Scared To Listen.

The Cat Dropped The Rat Between Its Two Front Paws. "there Are Those," It Said With A Sigh, In Tones As Smooth As Oiled Silk, "who Have Suggested That The Tendency Of A Cat To Play With Its Prey Is A Merciful One - After All, It Permits The Occasional Funny Little Running Snack To Escape, From Time To Time. How Often Does Your Dinner Get To Escape?

She Had Such Unusual Eyes. They Made Me Think Of The Seaside, And So I Called Her Ocean, And Could Not Have Told You Why.

My Theory On Genre Is That While There Are People Out There Who Believe That Genre Tells People What To Read, Actually I Believe That Genre Exists As A Marketing Tool To Tell You What To Avoid.

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

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.

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

Following Instructions

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.

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.

When I Was 7, My Proudest Possession Would Have Been My Bookshelf - 'cause I'd Alphabetized All Of The Books On My Bookshelf.

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.

I Asked Him If It Were A Mirage, And He Said Yes. I Said It Was A Dream, And He Agreed, But Said It Was The Desert's Dream Not His. And He Told Me That In A Year Or So, When He Had Aged Enough For Any Man, Then He Would Walk Into The Wind, Until He Saw The Tents. This Time, He Said, He Would Go On With Them.

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.

I'm Just Going To Stay Here, In The Darkness Under The Arch. I Can Hear You All Out There, Trip-trapping, Trip-trapping Over My Bridge. Oh Yes, I Can Hear You. But I'm Not Coming Out.

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

We Get To Experience The Same Thing In Very Different Ways With Different Parts Of Ourselves.

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.

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.

Trending Author

Thomas Jefferson

Michael Crichton

W. Eugene Smith

Category