Neil Gaiman Quotes

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.

It felt like a small forever.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

First rule of magic: Don't let anyone know your real name. Names have power.

Whatever's happening," she said, eventually, "it can all be sorted out." She saw the expression on my face then, worried. Scared even. And she said, "After pancakes.

Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say "what kind of tea?"

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

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.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf.

Take what you have learned, and move on.

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.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

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.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

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

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.

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? What then?

Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.

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

And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

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

I'm intrigued with figuring out the places [where] the horrible and the beautiful meet - that aesthetic fascinates me.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.

The world is always ending, for someone.

Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

"Some things may change," said Wednesday, abruptly. "People, however... People stay the same."

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

Also, I've already won all the awards.

Are we human because we gaze at the stars or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?

I don't know. I had to be something, didn't I?

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

You are young, and in love. Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.