Neil Gaiman Quotes

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.

You know that I love you." And despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.

The fallen autumn leaves were slick beneath Bod's feet, and the mists blurred the edges of the world. Nothing was as clean-cut as he had thought it, a few minutes before.

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

I was a book-y child. I was much more book-y than dark.

To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.

There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by.

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she met made any sense.

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness...

Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?

Something told him that something was coming to an end. Not the world, exactly. Just the summer. There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

You'll think this is a bit silly, but I'm a bit--well, I have a thing about birds." "What, a phobia?" "Sort of." "Well, that's the common term for an irrational fear of birds." "What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?

Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.

It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will take a graveyard.

They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.

I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.

And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.

It seems like every time I agree to work with a video game company they go out of business. I stopped because I was starting to feel guilty.

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

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

Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It's because spiders think this is funny, and they don't want you ever to forget them.

Some hats can only be worn if you're willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you're only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.

If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning — a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross.

I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

Where does contagion end and art begin?

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.

He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly. "Would you like one?" she asked the little dog. "Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool." "I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her. "Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.

You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

It won't hurt, said her other father. Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head.

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.