flâneur

Raksha Vinayak Hungund

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on the atlas — 4

highlights — 17

  • That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • And I didn't. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn't stop and look around and go, this is really fun.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • 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.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • Every now and again, I forget that rule, and whenever I do, the universe kicks me hard and reminds me.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • My first book – a piece of journalism I had done for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter from the advance – should have been a bestseller. It should have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out and the second printing, and before any royalties could be paid, it would have done.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript
  • What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding