Since I spent part of the time I should have spent writing this blog entry listening to Neil Gaiman’s keynote address to The University of the Arts, I decided that instead of writing a post today, I’d just share his speech instead.  It’s awesome.  Listen to it.  Here’s the vimeo link as well.

And for those who don’t like to click on links, below are a few of the quotes from the speech that I liked best (and yes, there are a lot of them, because it was that good a speech.  I just hope he doesn’t mind too much my copying and pasting them here…):

“Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.”

“When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.  This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.  If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.”

“Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes  it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.”

“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure.”

“… and I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn’t get the money, then you didn’t have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.”

“… it’s true that nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.”

“The problems of failure are hard.  The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.”

“I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable some of them were: I’d listen to them telling me that they couldn’t envisage a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn’t go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.”

“If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something.”

“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.”

“But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, 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.”

“People get hired because, somehow, they get hired….People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and 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. And you don’t even need all three.”

“People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time.”

“They’ll forgive the lateness of the work if it’s good, and if they like you.”

“And you don’t have to be as good as the others if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

“… let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.”

“Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.”

“So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.”

“And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”