Education Quote by Neil Gaiman

The line lands like a small confession from someone whose public persona is often whimsy and wonder: the fantasy isn’t on the page, it’s in the industry story we tell ourselves about “being discovered.” Gaiman separates two kinds of difficulty. Getting the first contract is the obvious grind - the gatekeepers, the silence, the sense that your work has no social proof. That struggle is clean, almost romantic in hindsight: you versus the blank wall.

The second hardship is messier and, in a way, sadder. “Learning not to trust people” is the price of visibility. Success doesn’t just bring readers; it brings intermediaries - publicists, managers, friendly strangers with “opportunities” - whose job is to translate an artist into a product that can be scheduled, monetized, amplified. Gaiman’s wording is careful: not “people” broadly, but people in the orbit of publicity “and so forth,” the vague cloud of handlers whose incentives don’t align with the work itself. The adverb “implicitly” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not advocating paranoia; he’s describing the end of innocence, the shift from assuming goodwill to demanding clarity.

Contextually, it’s a veteran writer acknowledging that the hardest lesson isn’t craft. It’s boundaries. Early career pain is about being ignored; late career pain is about being managed. The irony is that the “contract” you finally earn can quietly expand into a social contract you didn’t sign: your time, your access, your trust, all treated as renewable resources.