Carrying the words with me in book form is devine to me: the book is on my desk at all time and I take a peek in it every now and then. When I saw that there’s a book with the speech in it, I bought it. When picking illustrations, I hear Neil Gaiman asking: “Does it bring you closer to the mountain?”. The things he says in the video were so inspiring the me, that I wrote parts down to remember them clearly. I have the audio file on my phone, so I can listen to it when I’m on the train or tube. To remind myself what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Since then, I watch video about once every two weeks. They gave me so much hope and determination.

Right away, I was intrigued by his words. And people do judge.Ī while back, I saw Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech which he gave at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts in 2012. Putting your art out in the world is like showing the whole human race your vulnerable side. Gaiman also spoke of learning these lessons at various phases of his career, so these images likewise depict him at different ages and stages.Making art can make you incredibly insecure. And yet all those lessons - including the one ignored - seemed to stream from a single headwater.īecause this part of Gaiman’s speech is especially worth lingering over, Comic Riffs has excerpted his passage about coping with life’s brutal and sometimes comical hardships by heeding one mantra. Gaiman spent the speech sharing hard-won life lessons that he wish he’d been told of when he was of college age. Yet it was perhaps the brilliant stanzas near the midpoint - as the acclaimed author brewed an alchemy of truth and humor and effective refrain - that will resonate with the clearest powerful precision to many of those artist-graduates, as well as the lifelong artists who’ve watched.

As we cited yesterday, the entire talk was inspiring. And it sticks.Īnd so it was with Neil Gaiman’s viral commencement speech a week ago, to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (which says video of his address has now been viewed more than 200,000 times). Mesh that device with well-worded ideas that ring fresh and yet so universally true, and you wonder how they hadn’t occurred to you before - or at least lately. Delivered with the right delightful timing, this repetition can stoke the firing synapses like strange and weird and wonderful magic.

THERE IS A POWER, naturally, to the mantra or musical refrain or repeated sequence or whatever-you-want-to-call that device of relooping recognition that bores with force into our brains.

Neil gaiman speech make good art