Neil Gaiman Quotes

Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar. “What number am I thinking of?” “I beg your pardon?” “What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.

Never mind. There. For good or bad. It's done.

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.

There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

In comics, collaboration saves your life. How well you can work with an artist, a colorist, a letterer, is how good your comic is.

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

I don't necessarily think stories have functions any more than diamonds have functions, or the sky has a function... Stories exist. They keep us sane, I think. We tell each other stories, we believe stories. I love watching the slow rise of the urban legend. They're the stories that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

Just go with it. It won't hurt.' I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge. Oh yes, I can hear you. But I'm not coming out.

I think I love my dreaming process because one of the things that my dreaming process does is sort out stories for me.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart.

I'm probably slightly more famous than I've been comfortable with. Famous enough to have my phone calls returned is about as famous as I want to be.

There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.

He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

It is sometimes a mistake to climb. It is always a mistake to never make the attempt.

And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad.

Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.

Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types." "What are you?" asked Bod. "I," she said sternly, "am Miss Lupescu." "And what is Silas?" She hesitated. Then she said, "He is a solitary type.

You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.

Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.

I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I'd get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I'd love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn't taste of anything else.

You are young, and in love. Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you've done something.

She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.

You get work however you get work. People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

I remembered something somebody had once said to me. It's okay. Everyday is freshly ground.

Everything that is,casts a shadow

I'm bored," she said. "Learn how to tap-dance," he suggested, without turning around.

In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.

You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time." Thank you. Do you want something?

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

Dreams shape the world

If you cared enough about your characters, what happened to them was interesting... it's important to care about them, about who they are and what they do...I don't really care whose side they are on, and they can be monstrous on the outside or, worse, on the inside, but you still have to want to spend time with them.

Hasn't there always been a moon?" "Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky - it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden.

I thought about moving south, about continuing to run, continuing to pretend I was alive. But it was, I knew now, much too late for that. There are doors, after all, between the living and the dead, and they swing in both directions.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.