Quotes by Neil Gaiman

For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.

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

The only water in the forest is the river.

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.

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

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I'm English, and 'Doctor Who' was this thing that I've been watching since I was three.

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.

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

And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

B is for boat, pushing off into the dark. C is the way that we find and we look. D is for diamonds, the bait on the hook.

There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by.

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

Oh. I didn't know you could stop being a god.
You can stop being anything.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

It is sometimes a mistake to climb. It is always a mistake to never make the attempt.

I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.

I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that's still my agenda.

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.

I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.

Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's.

Mr. Vandemar showed them his teeth, demonstrating his sunny and delightful disposition. It was unquestionably the most horrible thing Richard had ever seen.

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.

Once you've got to the end, and you know what happens, it's your job to make it look like you knew exactly what you were doing all along.

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.

Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.

Door folded her arms, and stood taller, putting her head back, raising her pointed chin. She looked less like a ragged street-pixie; more like someone used to getting her own way.

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

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

And we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn't, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of us who died, and everything continued such as before.

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep.
Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

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.

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

Do not lose hope -- what you seek will be found.

After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place.

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.

Real life is rubbish at staying in genre boundaries.

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.

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.

Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: The song of the goat. Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

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.

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.

You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.

Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

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.

I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.

The universe is amply supplied with night.

Reading is important.
Books are important.
Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.).

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

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

She was the storm, she was the lightning.

In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.

Oh, monsters are scared. That's why they're monsters.

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.

I missed her, deeply, painfully. But life goes on.

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.

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.

In order for stories to work -- for kids and for adults -- they should scare. And you should triumph. There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary.

Instead we have to understand that even lost and forgotten myths are compost, in which stories grow.

Names, names, names... The names are the first things to go.

Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.

I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the fairy reel.

I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and perhaps, in some ways, it was.

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

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

You do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.

Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a daughter's ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirits can be broken, with love.

This aye night, this aye night; Every night and all; Fire and fleet and candlelight; And Christ receive thy soul.

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.

Scissors! Scissors! Have ye got yer ane scissors? Are ye deaf?

It's too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.

Anyone who calls you little lady has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and fatal.

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

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.

Leave no stone unturned. Deeply explore the beauty of your life.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?
Stories. And they give me hope.

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.

It's an America with strange mythic depths. I see it as a distorting mirror; a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic. It's about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all.

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

In this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.

Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.

Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.

If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it.

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.

Will eventually grow up and get a real job. Until then, will keep making things up and writing them down.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

I am a Hound of God. I travel my own road, into Hell and out of it.

When I was four I believed everything, accepted everything, and was scared of nothing. Now I was eight, and I believed in what I could see and was scared of anything I couldn't. Scared of things in the darkness, of things invisible to see.

You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer and the finest friend.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

Everything had been going so well, he'd had it really under his thumb
these few centuries. That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring
Armageddon on you.

But that's how it goes; you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you.

We get to experience the same thing in very different ways with different parts of ourselves.

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.

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

Where does contagion end and art begin?

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: Where do you get your ideas?
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

The cafe door opened. A young man in dusty white leathers entered, and the wind blew in empty crisp packets and newspapers and ice cream wrappers in with him. They danced around his feet like excited children, then fell exhausted to the floor.

I hate dreams. I don't want any more dreams. I don't want any more anything.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

If people are standing up there saying, my football team just won with help from God, then obviously God just pissed over the other team.

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

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

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.

There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies.

Mister whoever-the-fuck you are, said Shadow, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the engines, there isn't enough money in the world.

Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment.

Before that no one thought of us as colored-foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.

So you all remember: just because you're small, doesn't mean you got no power.

You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you can not have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.

The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

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.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

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

By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept.