Neil Gaiman Quotes

A god's relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Going to Comic-Con for me is always hard and weird, so it just makes me feel guilty. There's always a hundre thousand people out there who have copies of things that I've written and they really want signed and they're not going to get them signed.

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.

Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked...that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead

Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.

I know that this is the internet, and we're all anonymous and all that, but really. It doesn't hurt to try to be nice.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

Words can wound, and wounds can heal.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

The moonlight was enough. It would do.

I felt very much like a hooker who had just been told she was a lady of the evening.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe."

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again." "You could be the first," he told her.

Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked. “Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel. “It’s not always fatal.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

Oh, monsters are scared. That's why they're monsters.

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.

I think...that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.

Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.

You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.

I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it's taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked.

Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.

Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

What makes you think I'm giving you a ride?” “Because I'm a damsel in distress,” she said. “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.