Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Neil Gaiman, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Neil Gaiman quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 2130 Neil Gaiman quotes for you to read and share.
Not needing the money puts me in a magical place because I can say no. I like the idea of having good movies made or having no movies made. -- Neil Gaiman
I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things. -- Neil Gaiman
The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other. -- Neil Gaiman
You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else. -- Neil Gaiman
There are things in this book, as in life, that might upset you. There is death and pain in here, tears and discomfort, violence of all kinds, cruelty, even abuse. There is kindness, too, I hope, sometimes. Even a handful of happy endings. (Few -- Neil Gaiman
That was the April my father learned not to trust ducks. -- Neil Gaiman
Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly. -- Neil Gaiman
DESTRUCTION: Our sister [Death] defines life, just as Despair defines hope, or Desire defines hatred, or as Destiny defines freedom.
MORPHEUS: And what do I define, by this theory of yours.
DESTRUCTION: Reality, perhaps. -- Neil Gaiman
I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be. -- Neil Gaiman
Coraline also explored for animals. She found a hedgehog, and a snakeskin )but no snake), and a rock that looked just like a frog, and a toad that looked just like a rock. -- Neil Gaiman
The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them. -- Neil Gaiman
Before you read this ride the night train.
Do not sleep. Encounter people you remember,
now long dead, and read to them.
Before you read this.
battle zombies,
watch your step, trust no one,
kiss without thinking. -- Neil Gaiman
You're a big one,[ ... ] a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don't look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him. -- Neil Gaiman
You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen. -- Neil Gaiman
We don't do spells," she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. "We'll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn't hold with none of that. She says it's common. -- Neil Gaiman
It's just that I get distracted, and I get Lost kind of easily, and sometimes I have really bad days ...
... When, you know, I just want to Hide or Scream or Bleed or something, and ... All that ... -- Neil Gaiman
The art of writing is the same as the art of convincing a teacher that you really did do your homework or you studied something that you didn't. It's the art of lying convincingly and it's amazing how much you can learn from a little. -- Neil Gaiman
Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see the night sky and stars. -- Neil Gaiman
In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you'll never see again. -- Neil Gaiman
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. -- Neil Gaiman
this morning, listening to the BBC news, I learned that half of all prisoners in the UK have the reading age of an eleven-year-old, or below. This -- Neil Gaiman
Once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, 'Be whole,' and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping. -- Neil Gaiman
Look...it's not that easy. Let me tell you what you get. You get life, and breath, a world to walk and a path through the world--and the free will to wander the world as you choose. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
The boy with the dirty face stood up and hugged Coraline tightly. 'Take comfort in this,' he whispered. 'Th'art alive. Thou livest. -- Neil Gaiman
Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky. -- Neil Gaiman
for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he ... all pleasures available freely (but what we attain with no effort we cannot value), -- Neil Gaiman
Didn't I just say you'll never get any two people to remember anything the same? -- Neil Gaiman
He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass -- Neil Gaiman
He will sweep it up - everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow. -- Neil Gaiman
You'll see the heartbreak linger in my eyes, and dream of making me forget what came before you walked into the hallway of this house. Bringing a little summer in your glance, and with your smile. While -- Neil Gaiman
There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by -- Neil Gaiman
Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway - that's because they're all such liars. -- Neil Gaiman
What good is a vocabulary that isn't used? -- Neil Gaiman
Once you've been around for a bit you get to know stuff. -- Neil Gaiman
Could be anyone. The Kin. I mean ... it's like calling yourselves the People. It's what pretty much every race-name means. Except for Dalek. That means Metal-Cased Hatey Death Machines in Skaronian. -- Neil Gaiman
Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark. -- Neil Gaiman
HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY.
And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn't suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain. -- Neil Gaiman
YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD. -- Neil Gaiman
What you have to remember," said Mr. Ibis, testily, "is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter." "And if I had a double-headed quarter?" "You don't. They only belong to fools, and gods. -- Neil Gaiman
It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best. -- Neil Gaiman
When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts. -- Neil Gaiman
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks. -- Neil Gaiman
I loved all books that I could read, and I never knew if I was ready for one until I tried to read it, so I tried to read everything. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
So yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are. -- Neil Gaiman
It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers. -- Neil Gaiman
I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them. -- Neil Gaiman
Delirium: "What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?"
Dream: "There isn't one."
Delirium: "Oh. I thought maybe there was. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air
a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud. -- Neil Gaiman
So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?'
'Love,' he explained.
She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. 'I hope you choke on it,' she said, flatly. -- Neil Gaiman
The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. -- Neil Gaiman
Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is? -- Neil Gaiman
That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent." The -- Neil Gaiman
It's funny. I thought she'd live through anything."
Charlie said, "Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum. -- Neil Gaiman
Colors seemed brighter because Becky was there. -- Neil Gaiman
There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't. -- Neil Gaiman
It's an artist's job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors. -- Neil Gaiman
I will not be my father's dog. -- Neil Gaiman
..and the truth us not what people want to hear. It's a bad thing, and it troubles people. -- Neil Gaiman
It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It's the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed. -- Neil Gaiman
I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters. -- Neil Gaiman
That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again." "You could be the first," he told her. -- Neil Gaiman
I was a stranger and you took me in.
-Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921 -- Neil Gaiman
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere. -- Neil Gaiman
There are choices," she thought, when she had sat long enough. "There are always choices. -- Neil Gaiman
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants. -- Neil Gaiman
DEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."
MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister. -- Neil Gaiman
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you, said the young man mildly, from the smoke. -- Neil Gaiman
It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having. -- Neil Gaiman
But," expostulated Josiah Worthington. "But. A human child. A living child. I mean. I mean, I mean. This is a graveyard, not a nursery, blast it. -- Neil Gaiman
Without stories, we are incomplete. -- Neil Gaiman
This isn't about what is ... it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things. -- Neil Gaiman
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick
a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart. -- Neil Gaiman
What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don't you agree? -- Neil Gaiman
Cease your weeping!" he said. "It is I, Loki, here to rescue you!"
Idunn glared at him with red-rimmed eyes. "It is you who are the source of my troubles." she said.
"Well, perhaps. But that was so long ago. That was yesterday's Loki. Today's Loki is here to save you and take you home. -- Neil Gaiman
Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own. -- Neil Gaiman
It doesn't matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don't believe it anymore. -- Neil Gaiman
Twitter is great and it's glorious and it's easy, but if somebody comes up with something kind of like Twitter tomorrow, that's better or smarter or more useful, in three weeks time, Twitter could more or less be history because that's how fast things go. -- Neil Gaiman
Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour. -- Neil Gaiman
This is crazy', said Shadow.
Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
Shadow was a couple of a hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger. -- Neil Gaiman
I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny. -- Neil Gaiman
Most of the things that "everybody knows" are wrong. The rest are merely unreliable.
Batman -- Neil Gaiman
One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another. -- Neil Gaiman
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. -- Neil Gaiman
I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader. -- Neil Gaiman
You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There's always a piece of them in your heart. -- Neil Gaiman
His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life. -- Neil Gaiman
Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?"
"Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie.
"Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return. -- Neil Gaiman
When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel. -- Neil Gaiman
I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work. -- Neil Gaiman
There's a brotherhood of people who read and who care about books. -- Neil Gaiman
Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing. -- Neil Gaiman
I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all. -- Neil Gaiman
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. -- Neil Gaiman
And then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank, as the eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm a fairly undisciplined writer. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on. -- Neil Gaiman
Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words. -- Neil Gaiman
Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas. -- Neil Gaiman
You aren't allowed out of the graveyard -it's aren't, by the way, not amn't, not these days-because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the waterhole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, 'Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I'll look after your balls for you. -- Neil Gaiman
Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen.
I see you as a code to be broken, or a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jig-saw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of my own life. -- Neil Gaiman
You might not have seen a pale, plump woman, who walked the path near the front gates, and if you had seen her, with a second, more careful glance you would have realized that she was only moonlight, mist, and shadow. -- Neil Gaiman
Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries. -- Neil Gaiman
For a moment, upon waking, he had NO idea at all who he was. It was a tremendously liberating feeling, as if he were free to be whatever he wanted to be: he could be anyone at all, able to try on any identity; he could be a man or a woman; a rat or a bird, a monster or a god. -- Neil Gaiman
Seek not revenge, but the Buddha. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm a culture hero," he said. "We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
It's not the fish you bring home from a day's fishing. It's the peace of mind. -- Neil Gaiman
Better I should call to people who aren't there than that people who are there should miss us because I didn't say anything. -- Neil Gaiman
Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life ... you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. -- Neil Gaiman
I think ... that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt. -- Neil Gaiman
and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway. My -- Neil Gaiman
Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies? -- Neil Gaiman
Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies? I -- Neil Gaiman
I think you're doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You're growing a new heart, for a start. -- Neil Gaiman
Only the Gods are real. -- Neil Gaiman
I am sorry. I lost something there. Like a path I was walking that dead-ended, and now I am alone and lost in the forest, and I am here and I do not know where here is any more. -- Neil Gaiman
If you can't be happy where you are, you can't be happy anywhere -- Neil Gaiman
One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don't even remember your birthday. -- Neil Gaiman
The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp. -- Neil Gaiman
I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who went fishing in the lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky. -- Neil Gaiman
That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it was younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, lik oil spilled on a still pond. -- Neil Gaiman
Bod tried to smile, but he could not find a smile inside himself. -- Neil Gaiman
Magic,' said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, if magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be ... -- Neil Gaiman
Friday's a free day. A woman's day. -- Neil Gaiman
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)] -- Neil Gaiman
Ragnarok is coming. When the sky splits asunder and the dark powers of Muspell march out on their war journey, Frey -- Neil Gaiman
He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders. -- Neil Gaiman
Don't say 'sorry' like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin' on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me? -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly. -- Neil Gaiman
The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. -- Neil Gaiman
Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending. -- Neil Gaiman
I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes the ship would sail above dark storm clouds, as big as mountains, and the crew would fish for lightning bolts with a small copper chest. -- Neil Gaiman
Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps. -- Neil Gaiman
The Marquis de Carabas liked being who he was, and when he took risks he liked them to be calculated risks, and he was someone who double-and triple-checked his calculations. He -- Neil Gaiman
I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said ... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived. -- Neil Gaiman
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold -- Neil Gaiman
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. -- Neil Gaiman
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect. -- Neil Gaiman
I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress. -- Neil Gaiman
Hey, that's life, flick it off if you can't take a joke. -- Neil Gaiman
I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' -- Neil Gaiman
The stuff you bring back from dreams is free. -- Neil Gaiman
The price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted. -- Neil Gaiman
You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring them on. The god of the guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. -- Neil Gaiman
Moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come, and against the moments one was currently disregarding. Still, -- Neil Gaiman
So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. -- Neil Gaiman
What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago? -- Neil Gaiman
Some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee ... Follow me, this way. Everywhere -- Neil Gaiman
You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But ... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think? -- Neil Gaiman
Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world.
Some people never have them at all ... I get them two or three times a week. -- Neil Gaiman
As I live, breathe, and defecate! -- Neil Gaiman
You're enjoying this,' said Amy. 'My whole world has been taken over by a mysterious voice. All the people are extinct. Rory's gone. And you're enjoying this.'
'No, I'm not,' said the Doctor, trying hard not to show how much he was enjoying it. -- Neil Gaiman
Tolkien's words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. - Gaiman on J. R. R. Tolkien -- Neil Gaiman
I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good hearted. Not bright, but he'd give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. -- Neil Gaiman
I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy. -- Neil Gaiman
I missed her, deeply, painfully. But life goes on. -- Neil Gaiman
A trail of lightning spread across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing.
And of course they were. That was the point after all. -- Neil Gaiman
There's a tale in the Caballa that suggests that the Angel of Death is so beautiful that upon seeing it (or him, or her) you fall in love so hard, so fast, that your soul is pulled out through your eyes. I like that story. -- Neil Gaiman
Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right? -- Neil Gaiman
The paths that ghosts follow are written on the land in old words. Ghosts don't take the interstate. -- Neil Gaiman
People gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They want to know they matter. -- Neil Gaiman
FAT CHARLIE WASN'T CERTAIN THAT HE LIKED FREEDOM. THERE was too much open air involved. -- Neil Gaiman
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. -- Neil Gaiman
If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away. -- Neil Gaiman
To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day. -- Neil Gaiman
Lit, one of the dwarfs, walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the pyre, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse. "I -- Neil Gaiman
One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse. -- Neil Gaiman
She paused, there in the highest of the highlands, where the summer winds have winter on their breath, where they howl and whip and slash the air like knives. -- Neil Gaiman
Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again. -- Neil Gaiman
The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique.
Just like Peregrine. -- Neil Gaiman
I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there's nothing a puppy can do that I can't do! -- Neil Gaiman
It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head -- Neil Gaiman
I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. -- Neil Gaiman
Loki was not evil, although he was certainly not a force for good. Loki was . . . complicated. -- Neil Gaiman
You are an immaterial girl living in a material world. -- Neil Gaiman
It's just a two-man con," said Shadow. "Like the bishop and the diamond necklace and the cop. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle, and the poor sap in between them who pays for the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game. -- Neil Gaiman
Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead -- Neil Gaiman
What are god's?" asked the buffalo man.
"I don't know," said Shadow. -- Neil Gaiman
Who are you?" asked Shadow.
"The hardest part is simply surviving," said the man. -- Neil Gaiman
A book is a little empathy machine. -- Neil Gaiman
One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. -- Neil Gaiman
Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn't work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. -- Neil Gaiman
MORPHEUS: I did not intend to hurt you,
THESSALY: And what if you did not? Intent and outcome are so rarely coincident. -- Neil Gaiman
They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright's evil twin," said Wednesday. "Frank Lloyd Wrong. -- Neil Gaiman
It's not the fish you catch, it's the peace of mind you take home at the end of the day. -- Neil Gaiman
I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries. -- Neil Gaiman
Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield. -- Neil Gaiman
Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a daughter's ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirits can be broken, with love. -- Neil Gaiman
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
All things want to open. You must feel
that need, and use it ...
And then, suddenly, she understands, and,
somewhere in her heart, she lets it be what it wants to be ... and it opens. -- Neil Gaiman
You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand. -- Neil Gaiman
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live. -- Neil Gaiman
Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time. -- Neil Gaiman
For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even start crying, which would have been much, much worse. -- Neil Gaiman
Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. -- Neil Gaiman
You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine. -- Neil Gaiman
The other mother shook her head, very slowly. "Sharper than a serpent's tooth," she said, "is a daughter's ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirit can be broken, with love." And her long white fingers waggled and caressed the air. -- Neil Gaiman
I'll swap you my dad," I said.
"Oh-oh," said my little sister. -- Neil Gaiman
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. -- Neil Gaiman
Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so much trouble -- Neil Gaiman
I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm Jill Dumpty."
"So your brother was Humpty Dumpty?"
"And he didn't fall off that wall, Mr. Horner. He was pushed. -- Neil Gaiman
The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had the chance to find out about it.
-Adam to DEATH & the 4 horsepeople of the Apocalypse -- Neil Gaiman
And then they all sang a song called "I've Got a Loverly Bunch of Hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers," which was an ancient dinosaur song that had apparently been written by Professor Steg's Aunt Button. -- Neil Gaiman
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable. -- Neil Gaiman
He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura's grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie's cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart. -- Neil Gaiman
What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else's experience of the story. -- Neil Gaiman
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. -- Neil Gaiman
Tristran and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, -- Neil Gaiman
Turn my head, and you may go where you want. I turn it again, you will stay till you rot. I have no face, but I live or die by my crooked teeth - who am I? -- Neil Gaiman
She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. -- Neil Gaiman
For the record, I don't expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I'm a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar. -- Neil Gaiman
Maybe you're getting tired of existing on the whim of people. -- Neil Gaiman
You ignore the little voices that tell you it's all stupid, and you keep going. -- Neil Gaiman
I think most things are pretty magical, and that it's less a matter of belief than it is one of just stopping to notice. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm bored," she said.
"Learn how to tap-dance," he suggested, without turning around. -- Neil Gaiman
You got to understand the god thing. It's not magic. Not exactly. It's about focus. It's about being you, but the you that people believe in. It's about being the concentrated, magnified essence of you. -- Neil Gaiman
Odd pushed himself to keep walking, one step at a time, remembering back when he had walked with ease and never thought twice about the miracle of putting one foot in front of the other and pushing the world towards you. -- Neil Gaiman
I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you. -- Neil Gaiman
Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. -- Neil Gaiman
Did that happen?" asked Shadow. "Did what happen, shit-for-brains?" asked Mr. Nancy. "The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the Carousel. -- Neil Gaiman
Hold fast," he called. "Tell me your names, and your stations."
"I am the Lady Door," said Door. "I am Portico's daughter, of the House of the Arch."
"I am Hunter. I am her bodyguard."
"Richard Mayhew," said Richard. "Wet. -- Neil Gaiman
On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. -- Neil Gaiman
With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children. -- Neil Gaiman
We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive. -- Neil Gaiman
How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister? -- Neil Gaiman
I would dower you with experience, without experience.
and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.
But we make our own mistakes. We sleep unwisely -- Neil Gaiman
He had imagined Scotland as being a soft place, all gentle heathery hills, but here on the north coast everything seemed sharp and jutting, even the grey clouds that scudded across the pale blue sky. It was as if the bones of the world showed through. -- Neil Gaiman
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes ... you're Doing Something. -- Neil Gaiman
But knowledge is there, in the meat," she said, "and I am resolved to learn from it. -- Neil Gaiman
There was no moonlight between the trees, but the unicorn glimmered and shone with a pale light, like the moon, while the girl herself glittered and glowed as if she trailed a dust of lights. -- Neil Gaiman
I think all geniuses - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around. -- Neil Gaiman
We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, all that we have read. -- Neil Gaiman
People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick. -- Neil Gaiman
He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself. Odin -- Neil Gaiman
Gray February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something. -- Neil Gaiman
He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted. -- Neil Gaiman
The figure coming up the driveway was not Milton's Lucifer. It was the Devil. -- Neil Gaiman
If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you. -- Neil Gaiman
I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die.
Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now. -- Neil Gaiman
The Norse myths are the myths of a chilly place, with long, long winter nights and endless summer days, myths of a people who did not entirely trust or even like their gods, although they respected and feared them. -- Neil Gaiman
He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble.
Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god. -- Neil Gaiman
And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day. M -- Neil Gaiman
You know," he said, "I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It's what we do." There -- Neil Gaiman
I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It's what we do. -- Neil Gaiman
The woman was very pretty. She had shortish honey-blonde hair, -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun. -- Neil Gaiman
Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"
"No, Matthew. What do they say?"
"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.
'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline. -- Neil Gaiman
I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult. Today they gave me comfort of a kind. I was wearing the right clothes for a hard day. -- Neil Gaiman
They become more personable as you head south, the people. You sit in a diner and, along with your coffee and your food, they bring you comments, questions, smiles, and nods. -- Neil Gaiman
Black as night, sweet as sin. -- Neil Gaiman
The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself. -- Neil Gaiman
The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics-they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things. -- Neil Gaiman
Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.) -- Neil Gaiman
Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod, but still unique. -- Neil Gaiman
And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art. -- Neil Gaiman
Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare. -- Neil Gaiman
The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. -- Neil Gaiman
The trouble with everything, these days, for me, is time. There is only one me. There are a ridiculous number of demands on my time. There are so many things I'm trying to do. It's so much more about when I'm going to get time to do it, if I get time. -- Neil Gaiman
Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. -- Neil Gaiman
I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing. -- Neil Gaiman
You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman. -- Neil Gaiman
When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. -- Neil Gaiman
...Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there... has the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it's almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm an author. We don't want to lead. We don't need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people's heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don't. We never know. We just make stuff up. -- Neil Gaiman
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us. -- Neil Gaiman
We win some, but we lose many. We lose a lot. We lose our friends and we lose our family. In the end we lose everything. No matter who's with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it's always going to be about life. -- Neil Gaiman
Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty -- Neil Gaiman
Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future ... -- Neil Gaiman
Alviss, son of Vindalf. He's the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.
"But he's not a dwarf," pointed out Shadow. "He's what, five-eight?"
"Which makes him a giant among dwarfs," said Czernobog from behind him. "Tallest dwarf in America. -- Neil Gaiman
I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much. -- Neil Gaiman
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield. -- Neil Gaiman
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 ... -- Neil Gaiman
I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight. -- Neil Gaiman
She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. -- Neil Gaiman
The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness. -- Neil Gaiman
Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. -- Neil Gaiman
Books are a natural habit, so don't pick on someone else who is a geek/nerd who enjoys reading, or whoever enjoys reading, because there is no other job you can have, without reading a single time. -- Neil Gaiman
this is what they say: secure your own mask before helping others. -- Neil Gaiman
Go get your heart broken. -- Neil Gaiman
Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
He loved me. I do not doubt that. In hindsight, I do not believe that I loved him. I simply felt his love for me, burning and all-consuming, and reflected it back, as the cold light of the moon reflects the light of the sun. I did not know that at the time. I thought I loved him. -- Neil Gaiman
All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone,
We must speak of other matters,
You can be me when I'm gone
Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on,
Still are withered in the evening,
You can be me when I'm gone. -- Neil Gaiman
Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they're starting to think their way out of problems
sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. -- Neil Gaiman
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. -- Neil Gaiman
Inside the pub, Richard's friends continued to celebrate his forthcoming departure with an enthusiasm that, to Richard, was beginning to border on the sinister. -- Neil Gaiman
Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking. -- Neil Gaiman
He stopped for a moment, and he thought about people, and about things, and about how hard it is to do anything for the first time. -- Neil Gaiman
Mostly you are what they think you are. -- Neil Gaiman
There," she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see."You're wrong! You don't know where your parents are, do you?" she turned and looked at Coraline. "Now," she said, "you're going to stay here for ever and always. -- Neil Gaiman
You really don't understand, do you? I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. -- Neil Gaiman
She patted him on the arm. "You're fucked up, Mister. But you're cool."
"I believe that's what they call the human condition," said Shadow. -- Neil Gaiman
Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He -- Neil Gaiman
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark. -- Neil Gaiman
One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up. -- Neil Gaiman
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages. -- Neil Gaiman
But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open. -- Neil Gaiman
America: this strange, huge place where I now found myself living that I knew I didn't understand. But I wanted to understand it. More than that, I wanted to describe it. And -- Neil Gaiman
You're going back?" asked Bod. Things that had been immutable were changing. "You're really leaving? But. You're my guardian."
"I was you're guardian. But you are old enough to guard yourself. I have other things to protect. -- Neil Gaiman
I miss you', he admitted.
'I'm here', she said.
'That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost of the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then. -- Neil Gaiman
We ... we could be friends.'
We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not. -- Neil Gaiman
In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place. -- Neil Gaiman
Delirium: Um. What's the name of the word for things not being the same always. You know. I'm sure there is one. Isn't there? There must be a word for it ... the thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?
Dream: Change.
Delirium: ... I was afraid of that. -- Neil Gaiman
You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure they're really cards at all. -- Neil Gaiman
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to. -- Neil Gaiman
In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything. -- Neil Gaiman
Reed says that God made a thousand, thousand worlds, each like this one, only different.
I hope there's one of them in which I chose to walk another path. But I fear that in any universe my path will be marked with blood. -- Neil Gaiman
Doesn't matter. You'll pick up what you need to know
cultural osmosis. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it's because we are easily bored. -- Neil Gaiman
Dahling, when God put teeth in your mouth, he ruined a perfectly good arsehole. -- Neil Gaiman
The link between animals and words goes way back. (Did you know that our letter A began its life as a drawing of the upside-down head of a bull? The two bits at the bottom that the A stands on, those were originally horns. The pointy top bit was its face and nose.) -- Neil Gaiman
Further movements are not recommended," said Mr. Croup, helpfully. "Mister Vandemar might have a little accident with his old toad-sticker. Most accidents do occur in the home. Is that not so, Mister Vandemar?"
"I don't trust statistics," said Mr. Vandemar's blank voice. -- Neil Gaiman
With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar," said Mr. Croup, fastidiously, "the condition of the bowels is all-important. -- Neil Gaiman
What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?"
"What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?"
"Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth. -- Neil Gaiman
Circumlocution," said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. "It's a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity. -- Neil Gaiman
Furthermore, 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. -- Neil Gaiman
Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to. -- Neil Gaiman
She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did. -- Neil Gaiman
Did I hear you say that you had no intention of ever dying?"
"Um. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's a mug's game. I won't have any part of it."
"Then you must tell me what it's like. Let us meet here again, Robert Gadling. In this tavern of the White Horse. In a hundred years. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
If you are to survive, you must believe. -- Neil Gaiman
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't. -- Neil Gaiman
Let's see. Well, seeing that today certainly is my day - why don't you call me Wednesday? Mister Wednesday. Although given the weather, it might as well be Thursday, eh? -- Neil Gaiman
I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them. -- Neil Gaiman
Now," she told them, "now is the time to be afraid of the dark." Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all. -- Neil Gaiman
Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It's scientific. That's how I want to be remembered. I want to shine. -- Neil Gaiman
And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him. -- Neil Gaiman
I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem? -- Neil Gaiman
When I return with her heart, there will be years aplenty for all of us," she said, eying her sisters' hairy chins and hollow eyes with disfavor. She slipped a scarlet bracelet onto her wrist, in the shape of a small snake with its tail between its jaws. -- Neil Gaiman
I wanted to write two thousand words a day, and if I wrote a thousand words a day I was happy. -- Neil Gaiman
The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that. -- Neil Gaiman
It's a good thing to have friends with more houses than they have bodies, especially if they're happy to share. -- Neil Gaiman
Of course,' said Tristran, politely. -- Neil Gaiman
What's wrong?" "It's hard. It's too fucking hard. I don't know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats." "You mustn't talk like that." "Yeah. Right. -- Neil Gaiman
You're very good. Are you a professional artist?"
"I dabble," she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern. -- Neil Gaiman
It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these -- Neil Gaiman
Wednesday stood up. "May your choices always be so clear," he said, and once again, he sounded totally sincere. -- Neil Gaiman
Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. -- Neil Gaiman
I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes," she said to Atsula, "I feel that I could simply spread my arms and fall into the sky." "That is because you are a scout," said Atsula, the priestess. "When you die, you shall fall into the sky and become a star, to guide us as you guide us in life. -- Neil Gaiman
And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means "that thing over there."
("Quick, brave Himalayan Guide - what's that thing over there?"
"Yeti."
"I see.") -- Neil Gaiman
The abbot cleared his throat. "You are all very stupid people," he told them graciously, "and you do not know anything at all. -- Neil Gaiman
Stay here with us," said the voice from the figure at the end of the room. "We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. -- Neil Gaiman
Who wears masks?'
'Bank robbers?'
'No.'
'Really ugly people?'
'No.'
'Halloween? People wear masks at Halloween.'
'Yes! They do!' He flung his arms wide in delight.
'So that's important?'
'Not even a little bit. But it's true. -- Neil Gaiman
Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me over. -- Neil Gaiman
Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together. -- Neil Gaiman
Well," said the third. "Somebody's got to do the honours." "I shall," said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman's. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard. -- Neil Gaiman
I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust our legal system -- Neil Gaiman
I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. -- Neil Gaiman
You're no help, he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could. -- Neil Gaiman
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. -- Neil Gaiman
She hoped it wasn't a spider. Spiders made Coraline intensely uncomfortable. -- Neil Gaiman
It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats. -- Neil Gaiman
Your mother wouldn't describe a combination of Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, and Prince William as 'quite a catch.' There is nobody walking the earth good enough to be her son-in-law. -- Neil Gaiman
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire. -- Neil Gaiman
He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting. -- Neil Gaiman
She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death. -- Neil Gaiman
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent. -- Neil Gaiman
It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will take a graveyard. -- Neil Gaiman
You wouldn't have to wash, said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground in about Brian. -- Neil Gaiman
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading. -- Neil Gaiman
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. -- Neil Gaiman
DREAM ! Dreams shape the world . Dreams create the world anew, every night. Do not dream the world the way it is now, in thrall to our feline masters and mistresses -- Neil Gaiman
They never get easier, never stop my heart from trip-trapping, never let me escape, this time, unscathed. But they teach me things, and they open my eyes, and if they hurt, they hurt in ways that make me think and grow and change. -- Neil Gaiman
Loki's green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled. -- Neil Gaiman
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A. -- Neil Gaiman
I think of myself as a very lazy author. -- Neil Gaiman
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.
Not that year.
Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
I tried to imagine myself a long time ago, in the lands where these stories were first told, during the long winter nights perhaps, under the glow of the northern lights, -- Neil Gaiman
I really don't know what "I love you" means.
I think it means "Don't leave me here alone. -- Neil Gaiman
You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. "They don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old lady. "You leave wigglers alone and they'll be carrying on like anything. Show them who's boss and they can't do enough for you. You've tasted my cheese.. -- Neil Gaiman
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it. -- Neil Gaiman
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 ... -- Neil Gaiman
In Hollywood, lying is something that people do like breathing. -- Neil Gaiman
Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. -- Neil Gaiman
Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold. -- Neil Gaiman
Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them. -- Neil Gaiman
It's a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best if everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. -- Neil Gaiman
It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you. -- Neil Gaiman
Shadow felt deeply uncomfortable: it was like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens. -- Neil Gaiman
Trolls can smell the rainbow, trolls can smell the stars. Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born. -- Neil Gaiman
Trolls can smell the rainbows, trolls can smell the stars," it whispered sadly. "Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born. Come close to me and I'll eat your life. -- Neil Gaiman
The Sky was red, but not warm red of a sunset. This was an angry, glowering red, the colour of an infected wound. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
It's always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment. -- Neil Gaiman
You were lucky,' said Lettie. 'Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.'
'You would have come anyway,' I told her. 'You would have saved me. -- Neil Gaiman
Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you're waiting for someone to publish the first thing ... -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one's ever eaten before? Like chicken and telepone ice cream? Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn't like that at all. -- Neil Gaiman
To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due. -- Neil Gaiman
The witch was as old as the mulberry tree
She lived in the house of a hundred clocks
She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea
And she kept her life in a box. -- Neil Gaiman
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue. (from "Instructions") -- Neil Gaiman
First time takes forever, and then ever after it's over in a flash? -- Neil Gaiman
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: 'Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say ... '
He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant. -- Neil Gaiman
When I was about ten my favourite article in the huge and mouldering Encyclopedia Britannica we owned (the ninth edition) was the one on Lycanthropy. (Yes, I had a favourite 1890s Britannica article when I was ten. I am now aware this is not entirely usual.) -- Neil Gaiman
The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if ... -- Neil Gaiman
Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I'm not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head. -- Neil Gaiman
You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you ... it's like you're betraying yourself. -- Neil Gaiman
Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. -- Neil Gaiman
The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true. -- Neil Gaiman
This was the moment of the storm. The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else - a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. -- Neil Gaiman
It was still a cold war at this stage, a phony war, nothing that could be truly won or lost. The wind stirred the branches of the tree. Sparks flew from the fire. The storm was coming. -- Neil Gaiman
Some of us are so sharp," he [Mr. Vandemar] said as he leaned in closer to Richard, went up on tiptoes into Richard's face, "we could just cut ourselves. -- Neil Gaiman
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner. -- Neil Gaiman
If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us. -- Neil Gaiman
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy. -- Neil Gaiman
People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes. -- Neil Gaiman
Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. -- Neil Gaiman
My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough. -- Neil Gaiman
The good folk of Twitter were extremely helpful when I needed to double-check how much blackjacks and fruit salad sweets cost in the 1960s. Without them I might have written my book twice as fast. -- Neil Gaiman
Spoons are excellent. Sort of like forks, only not as stabby. -- Neil Gaiman
Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction ... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem. -- Neil Gaiman
The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're - pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true - ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me. -- Neil Gaiman
Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. -- Neil Gaiman
It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall? -- Neil Gaiman
I once read that you die because you see the Angel of Death, and you fall in love. And you fall in love so hard your soul is sucked out through your eyes, and that's the moment of death. It's a lovely, strange old Jewish legend. -- Neil Gaiman
The person in the balloon basket said "I hope you don't mind me helping, but it looked like you were having problems down there."
I said, "You're a Stegosaurus. -- Neil Gaiman
But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way. -- Neil Gaiman
[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama. -- Neil Gaiman
Time is fluid here', said the Demon. -- Neil Gaiman
Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill. -- Neil Gaiman
It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; -- Neil Gaiman
Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn't a real woodsman. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world -- Neil Gaiman
Thank you," said the dog. -- Neil Gaiman
The end of the story of Batman is he's dead. Because, in the end, the Batman dies. What else am I going to do? Retire and play golf? It doesn't work that way. It can't. I fight until I drop. And one day, I will drop. -- Neil Gaiman
There are no shepherds in Shepherd's Bush. I've been there. It's just houses and stores and roads and the BBC. That's all." pointed out Richard, flatly.
"There are shepherds," said Hunter, from the darkness just next to Richard's ear. "Pray you never meet them. -- Neil Gaiman
There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did. -- Neil Gaiman
She took me in through the front door, and into their enormous kitchen, sat me down at a huge wooden table, so stained and patterned that it looked as if faces were staring up at me from the old wood. -- Neil Gaiman
Oh, he'll help us whether he wants to or not. I told the truth. I would not kill him. The death-curse of a god is an evil thing.
But I can hurt him. And I will.
And besides ...
Have you never wondered, little bird, what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of a god? -- Neil Gaiman
You never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour's shut-eye. -- Neil Gaiman
I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back. -- Neil Gaiman
Goodbyes are overrated. -- Neil Gaiman
I don't think even Gran could take it out of you without hurting your heart. And you need your heart. -- Neil Gaiman
In film, a lot of the time you're not as engaged, it is all being given to you, and you're accepting it as it comes in, but in comics, as a reader, you are going to have to work, your imagination needs to do an awful lot. -- Neil Gaiman
Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them. You find out that inside someone you know there's just mucus and meat and slime and bone. They menstruate, salivate, defecate and cry. You know? Sometimes it can just kill the romance. You know that? -- Neil Gaiman
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. -- Neil Gaiman
The model for tomorrow, and this is the model I've been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001, is to try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago. -- Neil Gaiman
I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it. -- Neil Gaiman
To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love. -- Neil Gaiman
And the game begins anew. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman
I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing. -- Neil Gaiman
She said, '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. -- Neil Gaiman
Ragnarok is coming. -- Neil Gaiman
He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple. -- Neil Gaiman
It is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world. -- Neil Gaiman
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof. -- Neil Gaiman
The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back. -- Neil Gaiman
We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries. -- Neil Gaiman
You mourn, for it is proper to mourn. But your grief serves you; you do not become a slave to grief. You bid the dead farewell, and you continue. -- Neil Gaiman
Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do. -- Neil Gaiman
Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual. -- Neil Gaiman
The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk. -- Neil Gaiman
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. -- Neil Gaiman
Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished shop-lifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins, -- Neil Gaiman
On the side of Mount Calamon a grove of glass flowers grows. The journey there is perilous, and the journey back is more so. -- Neil Gaiman
The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys. -- Neil Gaiman
She's not talking now," muttered the Rani's aunt, wagging one stick-like finger. "That tiger is throwing his voice."
"Can no-one get that woman to stop talking?" asked the Rajah of the room.
"Easier to stop 'em than start 'em," said the tiger, and he dealt with the matter. -- Neil Gaiman
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious. -- Neil Gaiman
Let me tell you something. It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I'm no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get an half-hour's shut eye ... -- Neil Gaiman
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. -- Neil Gaiman
He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him. -- Neil Gaiman
My heart ... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. -- Neil Gaiman
I knew enough about adults to know that if did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. -- Neil Gaiman
I'll leave the way of words to walk the wood I'll be the forest's man, and greet the sun, And feel the silence blossom on my tongue like language. -- Neil Gaiman
The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one way only, and that way is treacherous and hard. And if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside. -- Neil Gaiman
What's it like then?" asked Old Bailey. "Being dead?"
The marquis sighed. And then he twisted his lips up into a smile, and with a glitter of his old self, he replied, "Live long enough, Old Bailey, and you can find out for yourself. -- Neil Gaiman
When something looks enough like something else that people watching don't know what it is they're looking at. -- Neil Gaiman
I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work. -- Neil Gaiman
It's a weapon, I understand?"
"In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is. -- Neil Gaiman
That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together. -- Neil Gaiman
Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way. -- Neil Gaiman
Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. -- Neil Gaiman
Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others. -- Neil Gaiman
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author. -- Neil Gaiman
It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this. -- Neil Gaiman
And all the time we spent in this place would fade and vanish, like a dawn dream on waking that colours the day but cannot be touched or remembered. -- Neil Gaiman
I am the most unhappy soul alive."
"I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls."
"Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine. -- Neil Gaiman
Old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life's vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that. -- Neil Gaiman
It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press. -- Neil Gaiman
He fumbled around with his eyes closed. He groped about, reaching for the comfortable and familiar shaft of his hammer. -- Neil Gaiman
You don't need princes to save you. I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men. -- Neil Gaiman
Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes ... -- Neil Gaiman
What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything. -- Neil Gaiman
For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done. -- Neil Gaiman
So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them. -- Neil Gaiman
But there's none so blind - ow! Good one! - as those who will not listen. -- Neil Gaiman
I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me? -- Neil Gaiman
But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there. -- Neil Gaiman
Love isn't quite desire ... Love is probably a little bit in The Sandman's domain. Love is partly a dream, it's partly to do with desire, and sometimes it's partly to do with death, as well. It's also very often something to do with delirium ... -- Neil Gaiman
Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?"
"No. -- Neil Gaiman
[Dream] I do not want a grape.
[Desire] I could make you want one. -- Neil Gaiman
One cannot begin a new dream without abandoning the last [one]. -- Neil Gaiman
Ohhh. Humanity, I Love You. You never cease to amaze me. This has been amusing, little ghost, and that was not something I expected. But every playtime must come to an end. This dream is over.
- "Playing House" From THE SANDMAN #12 -- Neil Gaiman
What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven? -- Neil Gaiman
Some things are too big to be seen; some emotions are too huge to be felt. -- Neil Gaiman
Silas came back at the the end of the month. -- Neil Gaiman
Human beings do not relate to written words in the same way that they will relate to spoken words. They do not relate to music in the same way that they do to pictures. It's all different parts of our head, different parts of our minds processing this. -- Neil Gaiman
She found herself to be quite worried that something would
jump out at her, so she began to whistle. She thought it might
make it harder for things to jump out at her, if she was whistling. -- Neil Gaiman
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not. -- Neil Gaiman
When I was young I was a fool. So wrap me up in dreams and death. -- Neil Gaiman
The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily back and forth across the windshield, smeering the city into a red and yellow neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the glass -- Neil Gaiman
My people
for so I think of them, although we are not united by country or creed, we are joined by our strangeness, made one by our differences
my people are hopeful, I think, but also scared. -- Neil Gaiman
Some of these days You're going to miss me honey Some of these days You're gonna be so lonely You'll miss my huggin' You'll miss my kissin' ... -- Neil Gaiman
According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea. -- Neil Gaiman
The person at the other end of the phone said something. Mr. Croup cringed.
Oh. Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. And might I say how your telephonic confabulation brightens up and cheers our otherwise dreary and uneventful day? -- Neil Gaiman
We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. -- Neil Gaiman
She didn't have a daddy?" I asked.
"No."
"Did you have a daddy?"
"You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men. -- Neil Gaiman
Now Coraline," said Miss Spink, "what's your name?"
"Coraline," said Coraline.
"And we don't know each other, do we?"
Coraline looked at the thin young woman with black button eyes and shook her head slowly. -- Neil Gaiman
Things. They came up. That what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all -- Neil Gaiman
Sometimes, "I told him, as the darkness swirled closer and closer, "you just have to say you're sorry."
It's more than that, and I think by then I knew it. It's more than saying sorry.
It's meaning it. It's letting the apology change things. But an apology is where it has to begin. -- Neil Gaiman
So," he asked. "How's death?"
"Hard," she said. "It just keeps going. -- Neil Gaiman
There is hope for you,' said the Queen. 'You believe you are my only hope, but, truthfully, I am yours. -- Neil Gaiman
Gee-word?"
"Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?"
"Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended. -- Neil Gaiman
The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter. -- Neil Gaiman
Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile. -- Neil Gaiman
The cat looked as if it were about to say something sarcastic. Then it flicked its whiskers and said, Challenge her. There's no guarantee she'll play fair, but her kind of thing loves games and challenges. -- Neil Gaiman
So what I want to know is, when I'm asleep, do I really remember how to fly? And forget how when I wake up? Or am I just dreaming I can fly?"
"When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget."
"But that's not fair!"
"No. -- Neil Gaiman
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. -- Neil Gaiman