Neil Gaiman Quotes

And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. (Quindi il giorno divenne un giorno d'attesa, cosa che era, lo sapeva bene, un peccato: i momenti devono essere sperimentati; aspettare è un peccato contro il tempo che deve ancora venire e contro gli istanti presenti che vengono trascurati.)

That’s the moon,’ I said.‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.

I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats

I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?

A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.

Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress. She smiled at him.“Hello, Bod,” she said.“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”“Names aren’t really important,” she said.“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”“Promise?”I promise.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?""No.

I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.

What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?''Cats don't have names,' it said.'No?' said Coraline.'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town.

It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong...I don't like flowers, not really. I like growing them, but that's only because I like seeing them blossom, and seeing them

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.

Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.

It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.

My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.

you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.

If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

...but fear of death gives us strength.

In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing.""Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

DEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister.

He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass

Traveling through the Dragon's Den, it has just been explained that Haroun, the Ifrit, has been caught in a mirror trap. Here is the passage that follows:"So," said Silas. "Now there are only three of us.""And a pig," said Kandar [the mummy]"Why?" Asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. "Why the Pig?""It's lucky," said Kandar.Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced."Did Haroun have a pig?" asked Kandar, simply.

You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. And then the most important thing, once you get any level of quality--get to the point where you wanna write, and you can write--is tell YOUR story. Don't tell a story anyone else can tell. Because you always start out with other people's voices... There will always be people who are better or smarter than you. There are people who are better writers than me, who plot better than I do, but there is no one who can tell a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit