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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Caroline was written, I thought Caroline was unpublishable. In fact, I was told it was initially. And Started it for my kids, my daughter, in particular Holly. Showed it to an English editor who told me it was completely unpublishable. We moved to America. The idea was that I was writing in my own time, but I didn't have any own time. Somewhere in there, I sent it to my friend Jane Yolan. I mentioned to Jane. It was an amazing children's author, but also at the time was editing a line of books. And she showed it to, she wanted to buy it. And the people upstairs at the publishing house said, absolutely not. And this was just the first third of Caroline. It hadn't even got bad yet. And I put it away and then.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you're me, you tend to do the things that are not actually. Financially sensible But make life easier. I write, I like writing things that nobody's waiting for It's much more stressful writing things that people actually are waiting for, that people care about. It's It felt wonderful to follow American gods up with Caroline. Nobody even knew that I wanted to be a kids author. And it was an odd kind of thing to be. I've just written this giant novel that's won all of the awards and it's incredibly adult and it's thick and it's a proper book and look I got the Hugo and look I got the nebula and so on and so forth and then Here's the book Nobody's Waiting For.”
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 in Fountain Pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out. So it's actually so much easier. Just sort of think a little bit more, you slow up a bit, but you're thinking the sentence through to the end. And then you start writing. You write that and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypothesized I might be writing. And I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s. And I thought, well, to do that, I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book. So that was how I started writing that. And again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated. It was like, ah, I'm not actually making, words are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be sort of very antiquated rhythms. And I thought, There's probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen Seventeenth century writing, 17th, 18th century writing You notice tends to go in very, very long sentences and long paragraphs. And my theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you're using dip pens. And if you pause, they dry up. So you just have to kind of keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writing where you're just going for a very long sentence and you're going to go for a long paragraph and you're going to keep moving in this thing and you're sort of thinking ahead. If you're writing on a computer You'll think of the sort of thing that you mean and write that down and then look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gosh. I actually don't remember whether I bought the electric typewriter with the money from a book called Ghastly Beyond Belf. Book of science fiction and fantasy quotations I did with Kim Newman or whether I did it, whether it was... Either way, I was just twenty three. And what I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, single spaced, so that it couldn't be used, and also so that I could get as many words on and paper was expensive. And then So, I could always do that. And I remember the joy of getting my first computer and just the idea that I wasn't making paper dirty. Nothing mattered until I press print, and that was absolutely utterly liberating. And then, you know, a decade on, Picking up a notebook. It was for Stardust, of which I decided that I wanted the rhythms of stardust to be.”
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 is true, but they also exist for another reason, which is kind of weird, which is to try and trivialize what I'm doing and not make it important and freighted down with weight because that paralyzes me. When I started writing Had a typewrit It's a manual typewriter. When I sold my first book. Had the money to buy Electric typewriter.”
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 can actually guarantee that nobody without disassembling the house. I mean, we actually have to take the entire house apart. Do you want to install a cast-iron fireplace from 1913 to get at the pen. So that pen now has been given as a sacrifice in the house gods and I need to get a new one.”
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 was the signing tour that I really got into icing my hand and wrist and arm. And, you know, I did the numbers. And as far as I can tell, I have signed about one and a half million signatures with that pen, which remained, and I had to send it off to pilot at one point, not because the nib was in trouble, but because the plunger mechanism was starting to stick and they... Fixed it for me and sent it back. And then my three year old son found a place behind a cast iron fireplace in our house in Woodstock where if you just insert your father's pilot 823 pen which you have found on the table just to see if it would go in there”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is just these lovely Italian pens. And mostly I love. Sort of this slightly fetishistic bit of having bottles of beautifully colored ink. When you start talking to fountain pen people, they really pretend to be interested in what pen you like, but they don't care because they found their own pens that they love. And they say, what do you use? And I use Pilot 823s for signing. And I actually now bought a pilot 823 because it's just a fantastic signing pen. It's a work course. It keeps going. And I got one in 2012. And it was my signing pen. I signed through Ocean at the end of the lane, you know, before the book had come out. I had already pre-signed, you know, written my signature 20,000 times with this pen.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is for books, or occasionally, you know, for stories or for things being reprinted around the world. And the contracts would come in. And that would be. Sheaves of them because I get printed all around the world and foreign contracts, a lot of them, you have to sign a lot. You have to do a lot of initialing. And I would sit there going, I have just spent 90 minutes signing a pile of contracts and I love that I got to sign it. So I contacted my agent. I said, can I give you like power of attorney? Would you mind just can you just sign these things for me? And she's like, absolutely. Great. So I got her. She'd never used a fountain pen and I got her a fountain pen. I actually went to the New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her and did the thing of showing her pens and going, what do you like? And I got her a”
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 is. It's that kind of thing. This one here is called a Falcon and again you put a little bit of weight on it and the line will just spread and thicken which is part of the fun of fountain pens. And I will just go and play. There's a lovely Italian one. I got my agent. I did a thing some years ago when I realized that I was losing a lot of actual writing time. Signing foreign contracts.”
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 one's a pilot. I think this one here is the Namiki. And it's really weird because Namiki is pilot, so I don't quite understand 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
“Try them out because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal. You go, no, no, no. And then you find the one I tend to suggest to people who are just nervously, you know, I've never used a fountain pen. What should I do? And I will point them at Lami, L-A-M-Y, who have... Some fabulous starter pens, and they're not very expensive and they're good. They do a pen called The Safari, but they have a bunch of good starter pens, and they're just nice to... Get into the idea of do I like doing this? The Let's see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? I've got so... This one here is a pilot. It's a Namiki and it's a flexi-nib ever so slightly. When you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It's a beautiful, beautiful pen.”
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's a real place. It's called the Fountain Pen Hospital. They sell lots of new pens. They recondition old pens. They look after pens for you.”
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 know, the biggest criteria I would use in picking, if you have the choice, is go somewhere like New York's fountain pen hospital.”
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 will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. So I'll get to the end of the first page. Oh, no, I have this pristine. But it is the... The thing that I tell young writers, and by young writers, and young writing can be any age, you just have to be starting out. Which is anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it because there's nothing there to fix.”
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 know, Dickens or somebody would have written a novel in. And I've just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dickensian enough. And whether or not I actually get to write it in Dip Pen, I'm not sure. But I definitely want to write it in a sort of old... Victorian something slightly copper platey, one of those old flex nib pens that they stopped making when carbon paper came in just so I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I'm using the next one on the next novel, and it may well go into another one. I'm not sure. And then at home at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is. You know, I've got We live in Woodstock, but I have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in Wisconsin, and it's become archives. It's, you know, it's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive. But waiting for me in that house. Is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago, and before I die, I plan to write a novel in it. And it's an accounts book from the mid nineteenth century. It's 500 pages long. Every page is numbered. Lined with accounts lines, but very faint, so it'll be nice to write a book in it. And it is engineered so that every single page lies flat. And it's huge and it's heavy and it just looks like a book”
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 my usual notebook right now is a Leuchtom because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper. And they're just like sort of moleskins, but the porsche of mole skins. They're just better. And I also have been writing, I wrote the graveyard book. I'm writing the current novel in a These beautiful books that I bought in a stationary shop in Venice. Built into a bridge somewhere in Venice. There's a little stationery shop on a bridge, and they have these beautiful leather-bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they're blank pages. And I wrote The Graveyard book in one of those, I bought four of them.”
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 they came out I really liked. I've used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big, although I kind of liked how much I could see on the page. Those were the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in, sort of big size. But they weren't terribly portable. I went over to the moleskins. And I loved them when they first came out and then they dropped their paper quality. And dropping paper quality doesn't matter unless you're writing a fountain pen because all of a sudden it's bleeding through and all of a sudden you're writing on One page leaving a page blank because it's bled through and writing on the next page. And Joe Hill about... Six or seven years ago. Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer. Suggested the Leuchturm to me.”
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 leave it out, I've just saved my self-work and it feels kind of like I'm treating myself. So I'm just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I'm somehow on some cosmic level paying somebody by the word in order to be allowed to write that if they're there, they should matter they should mean something. It's always important to me.”
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's a sort of a computery thing is if you're typing. Putting stuff down is work If you've got a computer, adding stuff is not work, choosing is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a gas if you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If the stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought, okay, I have to not do that because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous and thin. So, what I love, if I've written something on a computer and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I've lost work. If I delete a page and a half, I feel like there's a page and a half that just went away. And that's a page and a half's worth of work I've just lost. If I've been writing in a notebook, I'm typing it up and I can look at something and go, I don't need this page and a half.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I definitely, that's my editing process. I think that's my second draft, is typing it into the computer. And also, I love... So, backing up a bit here. When I was Was I 27, 28? In the days when we were still in typewriters, and there were just a handful of people with word processors which were clunky things with disks which didn't hold very much and stuff. I edited an anthology. Enjoyed editing Minds Tholger. Most of the stories that came in were about 3,000 words long. Move forward in time not much Five, six, seven years Mid 9 Everybody is now on computer. And I edited another short story anthology. And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and 9,000 words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the 3,000 ones. And I realized that what was happening is...”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's actually happening? And I also love that because Emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails. Your first draft can absolutely go up in flames. It can change. The age, gender, number of a character, you can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft is you. Telling the story to yourself. And then I'll sit down and type. And I'll put it onto a computer. And as far as I'm concerned, the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them Are just things for me, for example. Most of the time, not always I will do My first draft In Fountain Pen. Because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen. I like filling a fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing. So I'll have a notebook. Have a fountain pen And I'll write. If I'm doing anything wrong, if I'm working on a novel, for example. I will always have two fountain pens on the go. Least with two different coloured inks, because that way I can see at a glance how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go look at that five pages in brown. I wrote that. Half a page in black, that was not a good day Nine pages in blue. That was what a great day. And you can just sort of get a sense of, okay, are you working? Are you making forward progress?”
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 have a three year old son. He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. It's more fun playing with him than it is writing, which means if I'm going to be writing, I need to do it somewhere where I don't have a three-year-old son singing to me asking me to read to him, demanding my attention. And I think it's a really just a solid rule for writers. It's like, yeah. You don't have to write. You have permission to not write. You don't have permission to do anything else.”
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, because I would go down to my lovely little gazebo, the bottom of the garden. Sit down, and I'm absolutely allowed not to do anything. I'm allowed to sit up my desk. I'm allowed to stare out at the world. I'm allowed to do anything I like As long as it isn't anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book, allowed to phone a friend. Allowed to Make a clay model of something. All I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing all right. And what I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write. Writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. Know, you sort of sit there Been staring out of the window now for five minutes, and it kind of loses its charm. You're going, well, actually... Write something. And it's hard. I'm as a writer. I'm more easily distractable.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With, as far as I remember, no windows in the I think it was a Marriott in the World Trade Center. Which is no longer there, but writing in that hotel room you just wanted to be 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
“Having nothing else to do in this town, in this place, you settle down and you write like a fiend, and you get your James Bond book written in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room. And that was how he did it. And I have tried it a couple of times. I did it with the American draft of Neverwear. That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire... Of American draft, which was a big second draft. The book had already been published in the UK, but my American editor wanted stuff done because she pointed out that the book as it existed was written for people who knew that Oxford Street was a big street with lots of shops on it. Or whatever. It was written for Brits and Londoners. And she wanted something expanded. So I expanded it And I was in a room.”
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 those plots were both Ian Flemings. And you start realizing, ah, you really don't like writing when you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bond books. You read a James Bond book in two weeks You check into a hotel, you have to check into a hotel somewhere that you don't want to be, otherwise you might go out and walk around and become a tourist. You have to check into a not terribly nice hotel room. Otherwise, you might luxuriate and enjoy it. And instead, what you want to be is focused on getting out. And then you...”
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 two best short story twists, which are Lamb to the slaughter where the woman kills her husband with a leg of lamb and then cooks it. And feeds it to the detective who is going, I cannot figure out what he was hit with. Is any Fleming plot? And so is the one about the evil antique dealer. Who finds this amazing antique? On some farm and decides to cheat the farmers and explains that, well, the thing isn't worth any money, but the legs, the legs are worth some money, so I'll give you 20 quid for the legs and is about to take away this million pound antique thing. And the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away.”
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, Back in about 1997, I read an article by Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books about how he wrote the James Bond books. You read this article and you realize something which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing. I was always fascinated by the fact that. Several have Rolled Doll's most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming, Ian Fleming would be. Yeah, he gave Dull.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Played it, and you can hear there's 30 seconds of us talking. There's 30 seconds of us talking in higher and higher pitched voices faster and faster like Mad Chipmunks and then it stops. And that was the Roger Dean interview. And I... And the great thing about that was when Seven years later, I really was a journalist. I really was going around interviewing people. I was interviewing people for magazines that existed and, you know, had existed before. We decided to do the interviews and things. I always carried spare batteries. I always carried spare tapes. If I could, you know, the point where I could afford to, I even carried a spare microcassette recorder just in case.”
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 so we phoned up Roger Dean's publisher, which was basically Roger Deen. I think they were called Dragon's Dream, and said, like 20 view Roger, went down to Brighton. I remember the sheer amazement and joy of these paintings that were as far as I was concerned iconic. Religious emblems. They were, you know, and I didn't like yes very much. In fact, I didn't really like much of the music that he'd done covers to, but I had a copy of his book Views and just loved it. There was a painting he did of some badgers. There was just these things, it felt very Lord of the Rings. It felt very fantastical. And there were these amazing paintings covered in dust, propped up against walls. And we interviewed him. At the end of the interview, I noticed that the tape wasn't going round and got home.”
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 our voices had broken so over the phone, nobody knew that we were 15. And I remember interviewing Michael Moorcock, who was an author whose work I loved with my friend Dave Dixon, who told me recently he just found the tape and is threatening to put it up as some kind of glorious podcast, which I really hope he does. 15-year-old Neil Gaiman and Dave Dixon interviewing Michael Moorcock But the one that taught me my lesson was the It was the second interview we did. Moorcock was the first. And it was Roger Dean. And Roger Dean is an artist and designer. Most famous back then for the covers of Yes albums, this beautiful sort of calligraphy and these floating islands and things like that. And I got talking to some kid on the train who said, oh yeah, I know. Roger Dean”
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 when I was 15, I really wanted to meet and talk to Writers and artists I admired and I Couldn't figure out how you did this. I didn't know about conventions if there were conventions back in 1975, 76. So, I had a brilliant idea. I would start a magazine. The magazine, as far as I was concerned, didn't even have to exist. The fact that it went on to exist was really fun. And we call it Metro, which was a name I came up with because it sounded like a magazine. It didn't just sound like a magazine. It sounded like a magazine that you have heard of. And I love the fact that over the years, Metro magazines around the world actually do exist now. But in 1975, they didn't, but I could phone up and say from Metro magazine, people go, oh yeah.”
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 mean, you've been asking me incredibly politely if I could do the podcast or anything vaguely, sort of edging around it and giving me open invitations for a good decade now. This is true. And I love the fact we've managed to do the occasional tiny goofy thing. I got to do read a page of your book.”
2022-02-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT