Neil Gaiman Quotes

You can actually take your pain and processes it into some kind of form of art. So I mean, I've easily always been able to do that, but also I've always been able to give myself perspective - or, you know, older people always give you perspective.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

I write poems to figure things out

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Part of you just has to be in service of processing things and getting them out.

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

The true meaning of an artist/actor is opening my heart to the audience and at the same time opening their heart. Through sharing my pain I can possibly heal your pain, there is no other feeling like it, money doesn't compare. This is the true meaning of Art. I will attempt to do it till my dying day.

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

Sometimes it's not bad to hurt. Sometimes you don't want things until you get hurt. We got hurt today, let's see what we do.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

A need for revenge can burn long and hot. Especially if every glance in a mirror reinforces it.

Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.

Time doesn't. All that Time does is make it more distant, put more space between you and what happened. It doesn't heal anything. I don't know how or what does the healing, but it isn't Time.

Forgetting is something that time takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things.

Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.