I really enjoy being a father. And I have remarkable children to love. ("Oh, that's so sweet," says Miss Maddy, perhaps not entirely sarcastically, reading over my shoulder.)
Neil
In case someone else hasn't already mentioned this.
I believe the quotation is:
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work"
-Gustave Flaubert
David
There we go. It's listed in lots of Flaubert sites and quotation sites, often without the phrase "like a bourgeois". (Although Wikiquotes also erroneously attributes it to Clive Barker.)
Which reminds me -- one thing that seems fairly new is, not exactly hate mail, but a fair quantity of chiding email coming in from people over the last few months, telling me off for hating love. The people sending me the emails know I hate love because they've read a quote from me where I say I hate love somewhere on the web. Some of them tell me they feel sorry for me. A few of them write to tell me they agree with me enthusiastically. None of them, as far as I can tell, have read Sandman.
I crinkled my brow and went off and investigated.
If you google Gaiman "hate love" you get about 28,000 examples of the same quote. Some of the 28,000 mention that it's a quote from a character named Rose Walker in the Sandman book The Kindly Ones, but many of them don't. It's a speech by a character in a book I wrote which seems to have slipped its moorings, and in its wanderings around the web, become attributed to me personally.
It's probably worth pointing out that there's sometimes a slight difference between the author burbling on the blog or in essays and introductions (the kind of things that get quoted over at http://quotableneil.blogspot.com/ for example) and the things his characters say or think or believe.
...
And I was just about to go and write about Mark Millar's Crohn's Auction,
http://www.newsarama.com/marvelnew/CivilWar/MillarCrohnsAuction.html, when my assistant popped her head around the door and said "If you're writing a blog entry, can you end it with And now I have to go or Maddy and I will be late for our haircuts?"
What she said.