A Quote by Neil Gaiman

A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart. — © Neil Gaiman
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
The ultimate would be to compete in a couple more Olympics, hopefully break some world records and wind up my sports career with a couple of years in the WNBA.
My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.
One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.
If film making is magic, there's a difference between close up magic and David Copperfield. If you're doing close up magic, which independent filmmakers do, it is a very delicate craft, interpersonal relationship, and being able to enrapture a very small audience.
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.
If someone wants to be a part of your life, They'll make an effort to be in it. So don't bother reserving a space in your heart for someone Who doesn't make an effort to stay. ERASING someone from your mind is so easy... But REMOVING the same person from your heart is ANOTHER STORY. Pin It Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes... just be an illusion.
At the heart of my metaphysic there is the ultimate question and at the heart of the universe there is the ultimate questioner.
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.
The goal is to really blur the line. Can you perform a magic trick in a way that someone doesn't think it's a magic trick but is something amazing they haven't seen before? Then they have to wrestle with reality.
I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.
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