Neil Gaiman
English author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, and comics.
My grandpa sells condoms to sailors, He punctures the tips with a pin, My grandma does back-street abortions, My god how the money rolls in.
I have always felt, he said, that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.
Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago.
Apocatastasis. What it means:
1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
2) Return to a previous condition
3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
Think about it.
You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of their leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore obviously thinks so too. Strangers in Paradise is a delightful new comic, and Terry Moore is a fun writer and a fine cartoonist.
Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.
Seems I keep getting this story twisted so, where's Neil when you need him?
She does not know where any tale waits before it's told. (No more do I.) But forty thieves sounds good, so forty thieves it is. She prays she has bought another clutch of days. We save our lives in such unlikely ways.
American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say "what kind of tea?"
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 thought. "I want everything."
I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.
When I was very young, somebody maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it ... It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.
He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.