YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Gaiman

lines on the record: 87
first: 2022-02-28
most recent: 2022-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, not really. Genuinely enjoyed one of the great things about having you as a fan is the books arrive from you and they actually get read. And, you know, and I learn from them because you go off and explore parts of things that I'm never going to. And so I appreciate that too enormously.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, and I think he would have loved, I think he would have loved so much of this and also being Terry, he would have loved the fact that then people will come and pick up Good Omens, the book, and then they'll go and read Discworld books, and that will make Terry even happier”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's also that sort of weirdness of going Had Terry been around, we probably would never have got here. But getting here was all about making this thing for Terry. Which he also wasn't here for, which is why I'm saying, you know, so a giant interwoven panoply of strange emotions, absolute joy in having made it, joy in having made it for Terry because nothing else would have stopped me writing novels for... Three and a half, four years. But that did.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're doing something like making a big TV show or something, something this big, this complicated, where things can go wrong, Sometimes When things are getting weird or things are going wrong or the BBC are going a bit mad or whatever. The only thing you can do is just focus on the outcome and just keep going and keep a steady course and so on and so forth. And I knew Terry well enough and worked with Terry long enough to know that he was absolutely constitutionally incapable of doing that. At the point where things, any one of a dozen places where all we would have to have done is just Keep on going, and Terry would have been making the phone calls to the head of the BBC or the head of Amazon or telling Jeff Bezos exactly what he thought of him. Just like, no, that's just the wrong thing to do right now.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I knew that I should just be enjoying it. I knew. Should just be gone. This is magical. This is the kind of fun, wonderful thing that you don't get very often in your life. And I should just be exulting in it. And instead, I'm just thinking. I wish Terry were here. He would have loved the nuns. He would have had a great time with the Queen cover band and he would have been... Just, you know, grumbling to me about tiny details and enjoying it. Or taking enormous pleasure in tiny details and deciding which color wings you liked having best or whatever, he would have loved it. And he's not around. And then by the same token, I know Terry well enough to also know The way that Terry was built and who Terry was, we probably would never have got to this point had Terry been alive.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, really weird. Mostly it's wonderful, and then sometimes it isn't. Saturday night Amazon had taken over a 19,000 square foot lot turned it into the garden of earthly delights. It has a bookshop and a corner and hairdressers and a giant tree in the middle that serves alcohol. It has wings that, if you stand in front of them and activate some kind of Instagram filter, or maybe it was a Snapchat filter, will make the wings start to flap. Oh, you know, just filled with wonderfulness, and I'm there and that we have singing nuns and then a queen cover band come on. And I'm looking around and there's John Ham and David Tennant and Michael Sheen and all my guys from my lovely American gods cast come over and they're hanging out. I'm getting to introduce, it's like introducing your two families. And I was kind of melancholy.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right not to be alive, the right to end it all, the right to go, okay, I've come as far as I can in this and it's okay to stop before Become something that is shallow shadow Of who I once was That has to be a right too.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few months after that, he stopped completely. But it was inspiring it was inspiring watching Terry. Talk about Alzheimer's, bringing Alzheimer's, which everybody Has to deal with one way or the other into the public consciousness as something that was okay to talk about, not as something slightly shameful that happens to grandpa. And also just talk about the right to die. I'm talking about it as a human right. I really. And I understand, or you can list out to me all of the reasons why it's a bad idea. And look, here's a creepy family. And if they could kill mom for the money, they would. And right now they've got her in a home. They would have killed her and announced that she wanted to do it herself or whatever. I get all that. But also I get”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I knew at that moment he was never going to take it. Because Terry had a kind of rear brain, Alzheimer's. Memory was basically okay, but Shapes weren't the physical world had fallen slightly apart on him. He couldn't see things, he couldn't perceive objects. He could still think straight, but All of your spatial recognition, all of your object recognition stuff was failing. And I thought, even if you've got this stuff, you can't find it. You can't get something from a hidden place Nobody else is going to get something from a hidden place for you. And also... And you've hit, you're now actually beyond the point where you ever wanted to be. Didn't want to be here. You wanted to have stopped. Four or five months ago. But now you're here. And if you're here, you're here to the end. Indeed, a few months later he fell into unconsciousness.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terry An astonishingly powerful, I mean, he faced it head on and he made. Two or three incredibly powerful documentaries. About Alzheimer's. The one that ripped me up. Emotionally Was the one about assisted suicide? It was the one about the right to die. Which Terry became a very firm believer in and made his film as a About should you be allowed to turn off? Should you be allowed to go, okay? This is the situation I'm in and I'm in this body and I am done. You know, he followed a man to... Switzerland where he went through the end of life process and they turned off the cameras while he did. And it was incredibly moving. Terry, the last time I saw him Confided in me very proudly That he did have the death cocktail. It was hidden away, but that it was there for him when he was ready.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Omens really, I mean, the best thing about good omens was having Terry Pratchett as an audience. Because if I could make Terry laugh, I knew that it's like hitting that bell, hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you bing the bell at the top. What I did when I could make Terry laugh.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest thing looking back on it that I learned from Terry. Was a willingness to go forward without knowing what happens. You might know what happens next, but you don't know what happens after that, but it's okay because You're a grown-up you will figure it out Metaphors For writing a novel And George R. Martin, for example, divides writers into architects and gardeners. And I can be an architect if I have to. But I'd rather be a gardener. I would rather plant the seeds, water them. Figure out what I'm growing as they grow and then prune it and trim it and pleach it, whatever I need to do to make something beautiful that appears intentional. But at the end of the day, you have to allow for accidents and randomness and just what happens when things grow. So, the joy of”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it were me, my trailer would have just been sort of like three minutes of two characters talking. I was like, here you go, here's the trailer. If you like this, you'll like the show. But I think very wisely they put in, you know, Giant walls of fire and heaven and hell and hellhounds and all of the glorious stuff.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really good question. Well, you know, one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book. Good Omens the novel by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman. And it won't spoil anything for you with the TV show. There's enough stuff in there that I put in for people who knew the book. There are Easter eggs in there where only somebody who's read the book will know that something is funny or know why something's happened. But there's also things that people who read the book will not be expecting. So that's the first thing. YouTube or any Amazon Prime ads have You can go and watch that. It's a lot talkier than the trailer. The trailer is a lot of it is things going bang because that's what they like putting in trailers.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think mostly we have, and I think that is... Lot of that is casting Michael Sheen and David Tallant. We were perfect, and they'd never really been anything before. Because they go up for the same parts because they are very similar actors. And people were like, why would you cast them? Why don't you go, you know, it's like casting the same person. And you go, well, yeah, it kind of is, actually. And it's one of the reasons why it works so well. They have joked about, and I'm not sure if they're joking about if ever I write a stageplay version of Good Omens. They would go on tour with it and alternate roles each night.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's been really wonderful. This south by southwest has been the first time anybody has seen anything from good omens. And we've showed some clips and hearing audiences laugh. Was kind of amazing. Was that oh, it does work. It is, they're liking it. They're loving it.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I would stop and I would think, what would Terry think about that? I'm like, Terry would have nothing polite to say about any of these people. It's like, you know, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to do it the way I wrote it and the way it is in the book. We're not doing it with woodcuts. And it was like that all the way through. It was like, you know, just trying to hold the line and make this thing that Terry would have been proud of. And using Using stuff that we came up with. In the book using stuff that we'd come up with talking after the book, stuff that we would have put into the next book if there ever had been one, and just making it all. All something that Terry would have been proud of.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't prepared to compromise on it. And I am normally very prepared to compromise. I'm encouraging when other people want to bring ideas to the table. I'm like, yeah, go do something fun with this. I've already done the book or whatever. But in this case, I had a Terry Pratchett in the back of my head. I had to please and The producers would say, Well, Neil, I know you've written this sequence where Agnes Nutter, the witch, is taken out and burned and it's, you know, we have villagers and we have the 1640s and you've got a giant bonfire and an explosion and all of this kind of stuff. And we thought we could save a lot of money and do it just as well if we had wood cuts of what happened and the narrator telling the story. And I would be like, okay?”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we were going to do it as a TV series and we couldn't really find somebody to adapt it. And eventually Terry... Terry and I had a deal. We would never do anything individually on good omens that had to be together or not at all. And then one day he emailed me and he said, look, you have to do this. Have to do this because The only other person who has the same amount of love for an understanding of the old girl that I have. And I want to see it before the lights go out. And I said, okay. And then Terry died. Which meant that now it had become this sort of last request. And if the upcoming Good Omen series is good, which I believe it is Lot of what makes it good Lot of what, because I was the showrunner, I wrote it and I showran it. I think what makes it good is that”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tape would rewind and then Terry Pratchett's voice would come out of it, and he'd go get up, get up, you bastard. I've just written a good bit. You know, that was the process of writing. It was very fast, very mad. That was the first draft. Second draft took us much longer. You know, we had good omens. We had this wonderful, incredibly collaborative book. It was almost immediately bought by Hollywood, and Terry and I went out and had one of those hellish, awful... Hollywood experiences that you laugh at when other people tell you in their stories about them because you're like, it can't be that bad. It's like, no, it really is that bad. And it really was that bad. And then... Over the years, Terry Gilliam tried to make it into a film, which we love the idea of.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Millions upon millions of copies. This was before that. This was, you know, he just retired from The electricity board to become a full time writer. I knew how good he was. And I'm like, this is a fabulous apprenticeship. So, even though I didn't have the time. I said yes, and my life, you know, I look back on it and I'm just really glad that I was 27, 28 when I was doing this because I couldn't do it now. I mean, just physically and mentally, couldn't do it now. But I would write to Sandman. Until midnight, I would write the books of magic from midnight until about two thirty, and I would write good omens from 2.30 until about 6am, and then I would get up at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. And my answering machine would have a little blinking light on it, and I would press the button.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe eight months, nine months He says, Yeah, that thing you sent me, you doing anything with it. And I said, Well, no, I'm doing Sandman. I'm doing Books Magic. He said, well. I know what happens next So either Sell me the idea and what you've written so far, or we can write it together. Now, as far as I was concerned, that was a lot like Michelangelo ringing you up and saying, yeah, do you want to paint a ceiling together this weekend? You know, you going, I... I loved Terry's craft. Terry became somewhere in there before the arrival of JK Rowling, the best-selling novelist in the UK.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got demon number one who's done lots of evil. Demon number two has done lots of evil. And demon number three, who just hasn't really, you know? And that was the start. So I wrote. I had this idea about a baby swap, kind of like the omen, but it all goes wrong and it becomes a nice kid. So I wrote... 5,000 words of This thing. And I sent it to a few friends to look at. And then Sandman and Books of Magic took over my life and my time. Didn't really think about it. I knew that it was a thing, and I knew I'd get to it one day. And then I got a phone call from Terry.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book called Don't Panic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, which was great. I got to work with Douglas Adams, I got to rummage through Douglas' filing cabinets and obscurity stuff. I'd written the whole book of Douglas was and what hitchhikers was. And I realized by the end of it that I could write in that style, classic English humor with funny footnotes and things like that. That was something I could do. And I had an idea for a book. Inspired really by Reading the Jew of Malta. I've been reading Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and there's just a line in it where these evil Jews meet and they compare evil that they've done. And I thought Know you could do that scene with demons. And it will be really nice if.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Terry mentry that he had come up with one called the Necro Telecomnicon, the Book of the Telephone Numbers of the Dead. And I said, that's really weird. I've just come up with one called the Lever Fulvarum Paganarum, the Book of Yellow Colored Pages. And it's going, oh, we have the same kind of head that goes to the same kind of places. We became friendlier. After a while, Terry would start sending me his books. To read as he was writing them, you know, A floppy disk would arrive and it would have 30,000 words on it of a novel, or my phone would ring, and Terry would say, Hello, it's me. So which is funnier? And he'd just be writing and he'd want somebody to talk to. I had written”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Googe Street? I think it was Googe Street, proving that memory is gloriously fallible. Embarrassingly so since I'd actually Filmed a piece to camera in a Chinese restaurant. Terry's passing. But it's, you know, I was a young journalist, Terry at the time was working as the press officer for the Central electricity board in the UK. We hit it off in a way. It's just that sort of thing where you go, Oh, you have the same kind of mind that I have. Not exactly, but the Venn diagram of overlap is It was the point where we got onto the subject of grimoires, of occult books, and”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harry Pratchett, later Sir Terry Pratchett, was an English writer who died. March 2015, he was a humorist, a satirist, best known for the Discworld novels set on a flat earth, which is on the back of four elephants, on the back of an enormous turtle swimming through space. And he was my friend. Terry and I met. When his first book, first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic was due to come out in paperback. And we met for years and years. We would tell everybody that we met in a Chinese restaurant And again, a few years ago, I found my desk diary from 1985. And I thought, ah, there's Terry and meeting in February 1985. I wonder which Chinese restaurant it was, and it turned out we actually met on like the 28th of January and it was Bertarelli's Italian restaurant”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ensemble is real. I mean, I. And I'm not just saying this because for me. Listening to one of my own audiobooks is a lot Back when you were young, and we had answering machines, and you would be listening to the messages people had left for you, and then you'd suddenly hit your own voice. And it's just like, no, I don't sound like that. But I... It's Derek Jacobi who is one of England's greatest actors as the narrator, the cast of people like Miriam Margolis, Reese Shearsmith, just this fabulous cast.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's so lovely And then I started at the beginning. The one thing that I have no idea where it came from, because it was just sitting in the notebook when I came to start. It's like I'd written it at some point in the previous. Five years knowing that it would be start at some point was just a line there was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife and knowing that that was First line of the story. Feeling kind of, you know, having very mixed feelings about that because going, well, on the whole, this story is going to be very loving. It's going to be very tender. It's going to be about growth. It's going to be about families. It's going to be about villages. It's going to be about people. But the first few pages are going to be absolutely terrifying. That was the first line.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And did emotionally exactly the same thing I always do I had always done at that point with the graveyard book which is got, ah, it's just not good enough, it's not good enough. My daughter Maddie, because at this point we're in the Cayman Islands on a small holiday, me, Maddie and Holly, Maddie comes out the sea, wanders over to me, says, what are you doing? I said, I'm writing a story. She says, read it to me. So I read her the first page and a half that I'd written. She said, What happens next? So I kept going. And I think I would absolutely have been capable of giving up and failing at that point, except Maddie wanted to know what happened next. So I kept writing. And by the end of that... I'd written a story that felt like it worked. I had the tone, I had the voice, I had Silas, I had all of that stuff. What a great character.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a great read. And I got to the end of Ansibo's and I thought, you know, I don't think I'm getting any better. I think this is now As a writer, probably me. That's probably it. I may improve a tiny bit, but it's not going to be the leaps and bounds that I know that I was. So, I have absolutely no excuse for putting off the graveyard book. But when I've started the other two times and it didn't work, I started with chapter one. Going to start right in the middle, and I wrote The Two pages of The witch's headstone. Chapter four”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but this was different. This was one where I knew. I knew it had legs and I knew it was real and I knew it was good. And in fact, it was interesting. There was a point where I thought I wasn't going to do it. And I kind of gave the idea to Terry Pratchett. We'd had our photos taken in a graveyard and we were talking about graveyards and kids. And I said, well, there's this book that I was going to write and this is what I was going to do in it. And what is lovely is Terry didn't do any of that exactly, but he took, he wrote a book called Johnny and the Dead, which Sort of taking some of the stuff, but it wasn't close enough that I couldn't then still do my story. But what was great is I knew that this was still important and I still wanted to tell the story and over the years I would just Let it accumulate. And finally About 2003.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm describing the baby and I only knew one, so it's Mike. And that was really interesting. But story doesn't work. And I think I forget, I think I've got a... There's a demon in it. I don't have who I think is the person who. Winds up being the person who kind of accepts him into the graveyard. You know, nothing's quite right, but there's a central idea there. But I wrote, I remember writing that and just going, okay, this is a better idea than I am a writer. So, I need to put this off. Decade later, I came back. Tried it again. This time At least according to memory, it was only a couple of pages, and again I went, oh no, still not good enough for this.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kipling already kind of did that once with the jungle book, which is a kid in a jungle being brought up by wild animals and teaching him the things that wild animals know. So I would have to have a kid in a graveyard being taught the things that dead people know. And I went up to my office, my little office, sat down at my typewriter. Started to write Now, when I told people this in the past, I've said I wrote a couple of pages and realized that it wasn't good enough. And I was wrong. I actually wrote an entire first chapter I discovered. About a year ago, looking for something else, I found it. And wasn't very good. What was fascinating and delightful about it was the portrait of the kid. Which was very obviously a really actually looking back at it quite good pen portrait of my son Mike, who is now a third.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the problem with little tricycles is you cannot ride them around houses like that, otherwise you die. You hit the stairs and you die. So every day I would take him and his little tricycle over the road to this little churchyard. And he would pedal happily round and round the paths. The gravestones. And I remember just the... Thought process. I remember going, he looks so happy here. Looks really comfortable. There is something very sweet about a little kid riding a tricycle through a graveyard. And I thought I could do a story about it. Wouldn't it be fun to do a story about that? You could do a story like it would be like, you know, a kid. Graveyard getting brought up by dead people. And then I thought, actually,”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I can give a slightly better answer to that now than I could have done a year ago or I have done for previous years because I found something accidentally recently. Which Which gave me an insight into stuff on it. Five years old It would have been 84, 85, maybe even into 86. I was living in Sussex and Little Town in a very tall house where My dad owned the house. Actually, what he owned was a shop underneath, but the house sort of came with it. Because little old English towns go back for a long time, the house was at least 300 years old. And it was across a little lane from a country graveyard. And the house was incredibly tall and incredibly thin. You get a couple of rooms and then you get stairs. And I had a son who at that point Years And his favorite thing was his little tricycle.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I cannot imagine getting up in the morning and just writing. That's not how my head works. I need a while to get here. But I can absolutely imagine that one day I'll. All have become one of those morning writers from having been a late night writer in my youth and an afternoon writer, in my middle age, in my dotage I could absolutely become a morning writer.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That, I think, works really, really well. I also think that the most important thing for human beings is to be aware of the change. The biggest problem we run into is going, this is who I am, this is what I'm like, this is how I function. While failing to notice that you don't do that anymore, I'm perfectly aware that I may one day become one of those people who wakes up early in the morning and goes and writes. My friend Gene Wolf, who is Now, in his late 80s and is one of the finest writers that America has. For years was an editor of a magazine about factories, I think it was called Plant Engineering. And so he'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and write for an hour. Before anything else Before the day started, before he had to leave for work. Before anybody else was up, and that was how he did it.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was at Torre Amos' wonderful house in Florida. She has this lovely sort of house on the water that she's lent me many times to go and write in. And I went down there and I would get up in the morning. I would go for a jog. Come back. Do my yoga. Get dressed And get in the car, drive down to a little cafe where there were just enough people around that I knew that other people existed, but nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to. And I would order myself large cup of green tea, sit in a corner, and just start writing. And I would do that day over and over and over and over. And, you know, a couple of months later looked up and I had the ocean at the end of the lane, which was only meant to have been a short story anyway. It just kept going.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and tried being a late night ride, tried carrying on being a late night writer, and gradually realized that I wasn't really anymore. What tended to happen was somewhere around one in the morning, I'd be writing away. And then I would lift my head from the keyboard at four o'clock in the morning and have 3,000 pages of the letter M and just go, okay, that this doesn't really work anymore for me. And then I started... Rescheduling, trying different things out. Part of What I discovered, particularly about being a novelist, is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again. The closer you can come to just Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself. The last novel that I actually wrote.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started out From the age of about twenty. When I was a young journalist, 26, 27, a starting out comics writer. All through there, I was a late, late night writer. Nothing really happened until the kids were in bed. Nine o'clock, I might have fafter out a little bit during the day, but now It's all done, and now I'm getting down to work. Two or three o'clock in the morning, and I'm writing in England at this point, I may phone a friend in America just to talk enough to make sure that I'm awake. So that's what I did. And I was a smoker and a coffee drinker, and it was great. I moved to America in 1992. Gave up smoking 93 Stop drinking coffee when over the tea.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many hundreds of people who I assume are representatives of thousands of people over the years who said, you know, I picked up that book because your name was on the cover and oh my god it's become my favorite book. You know, I read it to my kids. It's amazing. And I go, good. That's what it's for. That's why you do this.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing introductions, writing introductions to other people's work, writing introductions and essays and things where you go, here is a thing I love. I can get it to the world. I can tell people why I love this thing. And maybe they'll discover it. And every now and then, and you know. Sometimes you know your introduction makes no real difference in the scheme of things. And then sometimes James Thurber. I was told I could bring that they would bring the 13 clocks back into print if I wrote an introduction to it. So I was like, yes, I'm writing an introduction to it. And then because it has an introduction by me, I've run into...”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's great to have three or four things going on. But there is that point where I start looking at myself and going, actually, I'm getting less done. I'm not doing that thing where I get stuck on Project Day, so I just immediately nip over to Project B. It takes me a little ramping up time to get to the headspace now of Project B. And at the point where I have project A, B, C, and D all waiting for me, What I do is look at them, make a noise like lurch from the Adams family, you know, one of those Kind of noises. I go off and make a cup of tea and play with ash or something. So I think actually it's one of those things where you just know thyself. I think I now have to start going, no, just one thing at a time. Also, means I'm going to have to say no to more introductions and things. And I love doing introductions.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It means that in the old days when I was young, I would have at least three things on the go, which was great because if I got stuck on any one of them I would do the other. Even when I was writing American gods, I would always have the next of the sort of the Coming to America short stories in my head. So if I got stuck on Shadow, I would just take a week and I do one of the coming to America stories. And then I go back to Shadow again. These days, I don't think I'm as good at that anymore. I think I am.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to be really good at working on multiple projects at once. I think. I have to start. Um... I think I have to start accepting that I'm not as good anymore at that.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got to write quite a bit more Caroline. And then a couple of months later I was starting to despair of ever finishing American Gods because I'd been writing it by that point for at least 18 months and figured that I had about a year to go and just said fuck it and wrote Coraline and just finished it and sent it off to my publisher and I was like, here is a book. You can publish this. And they're like That's great, but we'll wait for American guys.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before bed, so I wasn't reading before bed, I was just writing before bed, but I got to bed and I would reread what I'd written on Caroline and I would do five or six lines of Caroline. If you do it that way, you know, you've written a page a week. So it kept moving forward. And then we went on a cruise, a fundraising cruise for the comic book Legal Defense Fund, which is a First Amendment thing. And I was working on American gods and I did not peck due to a packing error. The American gods' notebooks, but I did have the Coraline book with me. So on that cruise, I”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bless her, she did. And so I went back to writing it because now it was actually something that actually had a delivery date attached. And I Did not have the time to write it in. It wasn't like I had more time. And I remember. What I did was, I had a notebook by the side of my bed. And instead of Reading three or four pages a night and then turning off the light and going to sleep. I would write maybe fifty words of Caroline. Which doesn't seem much.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few years on, I looked around and realized I now had another daughter, I now had Maddie, and she was a baby and she was getting bigger and if I didn't finish that book, you know, this book I started for Holly and now Holly's too old almost. And I needed to finish it. So I sent it to my new editor. But I sent it to my adult editor. I didn't have a children's editor. Jennifer Hershey at Remember, were we at HarperCollins at the time? It's still Avon? I think it was still Avon. It hadn't yet been. Avon got bought by Harper Collins, which is how I became a Harper Collins author. And she read it and she called me up, and she said, This is great. What happens next? And I said, send me a contract, and we will both find out.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT