Neil Gaiman quotes:

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  • I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.

  • So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.

  • 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.

  • Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

  • 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.'

  • A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.

  • When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

  • A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.

  • I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

  • In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

  • I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

  • 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.

  • What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'

  • I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.

  • When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.

  • 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 a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

  • 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.

  • I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

  • Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

  • I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

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

  • I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

  • As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.

  • The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

  • Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.

  • I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.

  • 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.

  • The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.

  • Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

  • 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.

  • I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.

  • The joy of doing 'Sandman' was doing a comic and telling people, 'No, it has an end,' at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you'd finished.

  • 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.

  • Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.

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

  • You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.

  • Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

  • I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.

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

  • I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.

  • I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

  • The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

  • Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

  • 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.

  • Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.

  • There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

  • Right, said Fat Charlie conversationally. You realize, of course, that this means war. It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.

  • Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

  • A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

  • Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

  • If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

  • You are almost never cool to your children.

  • You see, until then I'd been driven. I'd had a true quest, a purpose beyond my function - and then suddenly, the quest was over. I feltdrained. Disappointed. Let down.Does that make sense? I had been sure that as soon as I had everything back I'd feel good. But inside I felt worse than when I stared.

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

  • You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

  • Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

  • 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.

  • But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

  • I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.

  • There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

  • Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

  • Nonsense. Hardly touched a drop. That much." She held out two fingers to show how tiny an amount "that much" was"Just went to a party," said Richard, "and saw Jessica and saw a real angel and got a little black pig and came back here." "Just a little drink," continued Door, intently"Old, old, drink. Tiiiiny little drink. Very small. Almost not there." She began to hiccup.

  • You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time."Thank you. Do you want something?

  • 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.

  • You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. HempstockThey don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old ladyYou 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.."

  • We'll win, of course," he saidYou don't want that," said the demonWhy not, pray?""Listen," said Crowley desperately, "how many musicians do you think your side have got, eh? First grade, I mean." Aziraphale looked taken abackWell, I should think-" he beganTwo," said CrowleyElgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?"

  • Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information."

  • She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones)"

  • 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."

  • 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."

  • 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."

  • Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like - the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature - you'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.

  • But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

  • I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

  • Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

  • People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it's all changing. Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing.

  • It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. 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.

  • As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.

  • American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.

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

  • American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.

  • And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right. Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said. "Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats." Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked, "or breast?

  • When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie;" when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • Dahling, when God put teeth in your mouth, he ruined a perfectly good arsehole.

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

  • 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.

  • Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.

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

  • I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette... and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

  • 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?

  • It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.

  • Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

  • 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.

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

  • It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

  • Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commits acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.

  • 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.

  • Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.

  • Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?

  • What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

  • Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly. "Would you like one?" she asked the little dog. "Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool." "I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her. "Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.

  • Ray Bradbury was not ahead of his time. He was perfectly of his time, and more than that: he created his time and left his mark on the time that followed.

  • 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.

  • So you used to know everything?" She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars.

  • I have never written a musical. I have never written a weird, interactive piece of theater. I wanted to do something that would be disturbing. It will be disturbing theater with songs. There will be no people on wires. That's probably the next one of those things on my bucket list of things that I need to write before I get hit by that car.

  • Amy: This time can we... lose the bunk beds? The Doctor: No Bunk beds are cool, a bed with a ladder, you can't beat that!

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