If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.Īnd because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone from doing that particular thing again. 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. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible.

And it’s fineįirst of all, when you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I’d ever got, which I completely failed to follow.

So I thought I’d tell you everything I wish I’d known starting out, and a few things that, looking back on it, I suppose that I did know. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was about 15 of everything I wanted to do: I wanted to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago. I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it all up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid me for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I could become the writer I wanted to be seemed stifling. I never graduated from any such establishment. “I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education.

Note: I’ve added the subheadings to make the transcript easier to read. Here’s the transcript of Neil Gaiman’s inspiring speech in the University of The Arts Class in 2012. I knew it was going to be good when I heard the punchline of the speech: Make Good Art. But a friend of mine sent me his commencement speech saying that I’ll love it.

Neil gaiman speech make good art