damn... i must be hot!

Neil Gaiman is the winner of 3 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 1 Mythopoeic.

http://www.neilgaiman.com

• God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, *to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. *i.e., everbody.

• have you ever been in love? horrible isn't it? it makes you so vulnerable. it opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. you build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. you give them a piece of you. they didn't ask for it. they did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. love takes hostages. it gets inside you. it eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like "maybe we should be just friends" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. it hurts. not just in the imagination. not just in the mind. it's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. i hate love.

• 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.

• life is a disease, sexually transmitted and invariably fatal.

• sometimes i suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.

• 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.

• but he did not understand the price. mortals never do. they only see the prize. their heart's desire, their dream. but the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.

• things need not have happened to be true. tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

• it has always been the prerogative of children and half wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. but the half wit remains a half wit and the emperor remains an emperor.

• people think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. dreams are real. but they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

• you mourn, for it is proper to mourn. but your grief serves you; you do not become a slave to grief. you bid the dead farewell, and you continue.

• you wish to see the distant realms? very well. but know this first, the places you will visit, the places you will see, do not exist. for there are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. worlds like this one, 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.

• people kill what they fear. they burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange.

• you say i have no power? perhaps you speak truly... but you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... ask yourselves, all of you... what power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?

• 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.
  
  
• we have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are OUR stories.

• pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. resistance creates suffering. stress happens when your mind resists what is... the only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.

• i don't think that i've been in love as such, although i liked a few folks pretty well. love must be vaster than my smiles or touch. for brave men died and empires rose and fell. for love: girls followed boys to foreign lands and men have followed women into hell. in plays and poems someone understands. there's something that makes us more than blood and bone and more than biological demands. for me, love is like the wind, unseen, unknown. i see the trees are bending where it's been, i know that it leaves wreckage where it's blown. i really don't know what 'i love you' means. i think it means: don't leave me here alone.

• may your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. i hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful. and don’t forget to make some art: write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. may your coming year be a wonderful thing, in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. i hope you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and 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), i hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind. and i hope that somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.