63 Neil Gaiman Quotes

Neil Gaiman quotes

1. The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ('but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...') and it's magic and wonderful and strange.

2. Why do I have this imagination? It's the only one I've got!

3. Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

4. It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

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

6. 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 someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

7. Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, 'So this is how it feels,' and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.

8. We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.

9. 'So computers are tools of the devil?' thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

10. Fuck, I won a Hugo!

11. The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.

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

13. You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

14. I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing... I've always loved the gutter.

15. 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.

16. In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.

17. 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, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

18. The world is always ending, for someone.

19. I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.

20. Apocatastasis. What it means: 1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation 2) Return to a previous condition 3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution. Think about it.

21. We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

22. 'The little folk dare anything', said his friend. 'And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too.'

23. When I was very young, somebody - maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie - told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it ... It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.

24. 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.

25. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

26. 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.

27. There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.

28. It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn't cloudy or raining.

29. '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.

30. ... the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.

31. I think... I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt

32. I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples - and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.

33. What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore obviously thinks so too. Strangers in Paradise is a delightful new comic, and Terry Moore is a fun writer and a fine cartoonist.

34. Give a man a fish, and he's creating art. But teach him to fish, and soon you'll have a pool full of exploding koi.

35. I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor. He told me, 'There's no masturbation in the DC Universe.' To which my reaction was, 'Well that explains a lot about the DC Universe.'

36. Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

37. If you need me, Neil and me will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says 'hi', by the way...

38. But will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?

39. Seems I keep getting this story twisted. So where's Neil when you need him?

40. Get me Neil on the line. No, I can't hold. Have him read 'Snow Glass Apples' where nothing is what it seems.

41. Where are the Velvets?

42. Gaiman has also been tributed by having a race of alien beings named after him on the television and book series 'Babylon 5.' 'The Gaim' are a race of beings with long, fly-like faces remniscent of the mask worn by Gaiman's 'Sandman' character.

1. When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

2. When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

3. So many things to see, people to do.

4. You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

5. You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

6. Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

7. What do stars do? They shine.

8. You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

9. You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.

10. The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?

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

12. When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.

13. Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

14. For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even start crying, which would have been much, much worse.

15. A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

16. You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it.

17. Going to Comic-Con for me is always hard and weird, so it just makes me feel guilty. There's always a hundre thousand people out there who have copies of things that I've written and they really want signed and they're not going to get them signed.

18. I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work.

19. Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross.

20. You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. "They don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old lady. "You 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..

21. Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.