Neil Gaiman Quotes

[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.

Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Whatever you're scared of doing, Do it.

If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know.

I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

He told me not to seek revenge, but to seek the Buddha,' said the fox spirit, sadly. 'Wise counsel,' said the fox of dreams. 'Vegeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it. And...?' 'I shall seek the Buddha,' said the fox, with a toss of her head. 'But first I shall seek revenge.

This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.

The only water in the forest is the River.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.

You have a very open relationship with your fans." "Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

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.

I think . . . I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.' 'If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,' was all she said.

However you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

I have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do.

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in cliches and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little cafe on the other side of Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm.

The cartoon me writes the books cartoon people read in the cartoon world, because they need things to read there too.

I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I'm called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.

I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.

Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story.

I was bright, and I could use that as a weapon: words can wound, whatever those sticks and stones sayings claim about them never hurting, and I could use them if I had to.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

The real world has no obligation to be convincing, so it throws up some very weird moments sometimes.

My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It's quiet.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.

I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.

You shine like a beacon in a dark world.

Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.

You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Friday's a free day. A woman's day.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.