She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
This is one of the funniest, constantly-misused quotes I see around on the internet, as most people I see sharing it seem to think it’s either from a romance or about, at the closest to the truth, a femme fatale, while actually it’s something the men in the room think about War herself, who’s traveling around the world creating wars until the Apocalypse shows up, and they all realize at once that while they’re attracted to her, they’re mostly terrified by her, and it’s both hilarious because she’s a Horseman of the Apocalypse and this great metaphor for war and how men and war correspondents are thrilled by war when it’s at a distance but never up close, and I’m so into it.
I love the question and it’s one that I get asked, every single time something of mine is turned into a film or into something for TV. I always wind up saying, “No, it’s nothing like the thing in my head,” and then people always look sad. And then, I have to explain that the most faithful adaptations in the world couldn’t be the thing that I had in my head. If I had written, “Two people were having a picnic in a meadow under a tree,” and you picked me a meadow and a tree, it still won’t look like the one in my head. For that matter, if I write a script and direct it myself, and work with the art directors and everybody else, what I’m shooting is not going to be the thing in my head, either. I’m okay with that. What you do is you delight in what your collaborators do and what your collaborators bring. Occasionally, you wind up saying, “No, it really isn’t like that,” or you do what I did with Sandman, over the years, where an artist would do something and you’d go, “Okay, well, you did this thing. Next time, could you do it more like this?” You try to push it towards the thing that you have in your head, but you know that not only do you never get there, you also know that the joy and the magic comes from seeing what other people have in their heads.
Neil Gaiman, when asked on how close is the American Gods adaptation, visually, to what he saw in his imagination. (via Collider)
Sometimes I think of stories as animals. Some common, some rare, some endangered. There are stories that are old, like sharks, and stories as new on this earth as people or cats.
Cinderella, for example, is a story which, in its variants, has spread across the world as successfully as rats or crows. You’ll find it in every culture. Then there are stories like the Iliad, which remind me more of giraffes—uncommon, but instantly recognized whenever they appear or are retold. There are—there must be—stories that have become extinct, like the mastodon or the sabre-toothed tiger, leaving not even bones behind; stories that died when the people who told them died and could tell them no longer or stories that, long forgotten, have left only fossil fragments of themselves in other tales. We have a handful of chapters of the Satyricon, no more.
Neil Gaiman, “Introduction” to Caitlín R. Kiernan’s novelization ofRobert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (via tomtefairytaleblog)
I’d forgotten that this existed when we rounded up introductions for THE VIEW FROM THE CHEAP SEATS.
The series will focus on the mysterious Shadow, a man who is released
from prison a few days early after serving a three-year sentence for
bank robbery when his beloved wife Laura is killed in a car accident.
Flying home for the funeral, Shadow is seated next to a man who
introduces himself only as Mr. Wednesday, and this man knows more about
Shadow’s life, both past and present, than is possible. Shadow comes to
learn that Wednesday is, in fact, the god Odin
of Norse mythology and that all of the gods that mankind has ever
believed in are alive in human form and live among regular people.
Shadow is soon thrust into a gathering conflict between the Old gods and
the so-called “New gods”, the gods of money and technology who believe
there is no longer room on Earth for the old gods.
RandomFandom 