Neil Gaiman Quotes

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.

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

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

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

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

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually.

Joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together.

Take one, and you cannot take the other. But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk — the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?

Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')

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

Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

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

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

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

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.

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

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

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.

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.

While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe.

Even nothing cannot last forever.

I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.

Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.

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.

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in betweens.

Diana used to tell me she had a travel jinx, something I only really started to believe when the plane door fell off.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.

What about volcanoes?" "What about them?" "All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.