Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell.
Title: Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World.
Author: Neil Gaiman.
Artist: Chris Riddell.
Genre: Non-fiction, self-help and motivation, writing, art, speeches.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2018.
Summary: No less than a creative call to arms from the mind of Neil Gaiman, the book combines the beloved author's extraordinary words with deft and striking illustrations from the artist. Drawn together from speeches, poems, and creative manifestos, this volume explores how reading, imagining, and creating can change the world. It is a stirring testament to the freedom of ideas, making art in the face of adversity, and choosing to be bold.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatise and deny. I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like.
♥ I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas. I believe that people and books and newspapers are containers for ideas, but that burning people who hold the ideas will be as unsuccessful as firebombing the newspaper archives. It is already too late. It is always too late. The ideas are already out, hiding behind people's eyes, waiting in their thoughts. They can be whispered. They can be written on walls in the dead of night. They can be drawn.
♥ I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile too.
♥ I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: And yet it moves.
♥ It's obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read diction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur. So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. Everything changes when we read.
♥ You're finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this: THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. Things can be different.
♥ I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before digital books showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand. They are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.
♥ Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.
♥ First of all: 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. Id 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.
♥ I learned to write by writing. I tended to so anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant life did no feel like work.
♥ 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.
♥ 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. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? MAKE GOOD ART. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? MAKE GOOD ART. IRS on your trail? MAKE GOOD ART. Cat exploded? MAKE GOOD ART. Somebody on the internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? MAKE GOOD ART. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. MAKE GOOD ART. Make it on the good days too.
♥ People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because
1. Their work is good.
and 2. Because they are easy to get along with.
and 3. Because they deliver the work on time.
And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. 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 is 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.
♥ King liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines. All that, and his advice was this: "This is really great. You should enjoy it." And I didn't.
Best advice I got that I ignored. Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head or wondering about it. And I didn't stop and look around and go, This is really fun.
I wish I'd enjoyed it more. It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on. That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: To let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.
♥ I wish you luck. Luck is useful. 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.
♥ The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the mew rules are. So make up your own rules.
♥ 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.
♥ Make interesting, amazing, glorious, fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. MAKE GOOD ART.