Neil Gaiman Quotes

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

There are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?' 'Love,' he explained. She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. 'I hope you choke on it,' she said, flatly.

There's a tale in the Caballa that suggests that the Angel of Death is so beautiful that upon seeing it (or him, or her) you fall in love so hard, so fast, that your soul is pulled out through your eyes. I like that story.

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island

I'd love to think that people in the future would gather in theatres, at conventions, and in darkened rooms, and read it out to each other.

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

What do stars do? They shine.

Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

Libraries really are the gates to the future.

Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?

There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.

I'm a stranger," pointed out Bod. "You're not," she said, definitely. "You're a little boy." And then she said, "And you're my friend. So you can't be a stranger.

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.

You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly. 'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.

Something feels weird," he told Laura. That wasn't the first thing he said to her. The first thing was "I love you," because it's a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did.

There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren't what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be.

The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispencing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don't like.

You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.

If people are standing up there saying, my football team just won with help from God, then obviously God just pissed over the other team.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.

I think you have to accept that an artist also has a relationship with his or her art and his or her fans: you are in an open relationship whether you like it or not. Give the artist room to go into the place they create (literally or metaphorically) . And love them when they can't remember where they put their keys.

I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow to the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.

After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers.

Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.

One thing that's interesting to me is how we as humans seem to be losing our ability to stand still and be alone with our thoughts. If you want to, you have to arrange it now. You have to go off where there's no WiFi and leave your equipment behind, but still have some sort of GPS tracking to make sure you don't get lost or die.

When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."

Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life....As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible.

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.