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.
Neil GaimanRead
When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.
Interpretation
What this quote means
In difficult times, channel your experiences into creativity and expression.
Neil Gaiman's quote emphasizes the importance of harnessing one's challenges and adversities to create something meaningful. Rather than succumbing to despair when faced with difficulties, the quote encourages individuals to transform their struggles into art, suggesting that creative expression can be a powerful outlet for processing emotions and experiences.
Themes
ArtCreativityAdversityExpressionStruggle
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk about coping with life's challenges, you might say, 'As Neil Gaiman puts it, when things go wrong, we should strive to make good art.'
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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.
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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.
Neil GaimanRead
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.
Neil GaimanRead
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. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
Neil GaimanRead
Similar quotes
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
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All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.
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Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
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