Neil Gaiman Quotes

The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and wounds can heal. All of these things are true.

'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring because yesterday has brought it.

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last.

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.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.

I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

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.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

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

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.

Where does contagion end and art begin?

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.

You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.

You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world.

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

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

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

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

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

I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

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

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.