Neil Gaiman Quotes

Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.

Nobody's American," said Wednesday. "Not originally. That's my point.

He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.

What do I do now?” “I don’t know. Fade away, perhaps. Or find another role.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

For tea she went down to see Misses Spink and Forcible. She had three digestive biscuits, a glass of limeade, and a cup of weak tea. The limeade was very interesting. It didn't taste anything like limes. It tasted bright green and vaguely chemical. Coraline liked it enormously. She wished they had it at home. "How are your dear mother and father?" asked Miss Spink. "Missing," said Coraline. "I haven't seen either of them since yesterday. I'm on my own. I think I've probably become a single child family.

The comic convention itself tends to come second to the giant announcements in Hall H and the movies and the TV. So I think it's always good to remind people that there is a wonderful comic convention going on.

Death is the second oldest of the Endless. It's hard not to love her. She loves you, after all.

I am an academic," said Professor Mandalay, "and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

I don't just randomly kill people... I kill people when it's funny.

Nothin’ wrong with witchfinding. I’d like to be a witchfinder. It’s just, well, you’ve got to take it in turns. Today we’ll go out witchfinding, an’ tomorrow we could hide, an’ it’d be the witches’ turn to find US.

Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.

And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.

They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak.

Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

He's out here, somewhere, and he wants you dead,' she said. 'Him as killed your family. Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us. Come home, Bod.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Without dreams, there could be no despair.

It felt like a small forever.

I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something.

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.

Books are special, books are the way we talk to generations that have not turned up yet. The fact that we can actually, essentially communicate with the people in ancient Egypt, people in Rome and Greece, people in ancient Britain, people in New York in the 1920s who can communicate to us and change the way we think, and change the things that we believe. I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?

When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.

There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.

It goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.

When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.

When I was young I was a fool. So wrap me up in dreams and death.

I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.

There are lots of artists in the world. But there's only one you. And the only person who has your point of view is you. If you decide not to make things, all you've done is deprive the world of all the stuff that only you could have brought to it.

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

The converse held reassuringly true: daylight was safe. Daylight was always safe.

Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.