Neil Gaiman Quotes

He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

I used to get my best ideas from being bored, and now, if I even think I'm being faintly bored, I have two million Twitter followers I can engage with. It's great, but I also think it's important to be able to let your thoughts flow and percolate.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY. And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn't suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain.

I am the most unhappy soul alive." "I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls." "Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine.

For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even start crying, which would have been much, much worse.

We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall

She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It’s scientific. That’s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.

Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.

All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I'm gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I'm gone.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.

You know you can set fire to the capacity to say.

You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.

There's an expression, deja vu, that means that you feel like you've been somewhere before, that you've somehow already dreamed it or experienced it in your mind.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

I was one of those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

So many things to see, people to do.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

People are icebergs. So much of us is underneath.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.

They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.

It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted.

Are you scared?’ asked Mr. Ibis. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.

If a Devil is one who dares, when others hold back, then I am happy to play the Devil in this Mystery, boy.

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.

So, you figure they won't notice you're back?" sneered the marquis. "Just, 'oh look, there's another angel, here, grab a harp and on with the hosannas'?

[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth.