Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants. - Neil Gaiman
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up. - Neil Gaiman
But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009) - Neil Gaiman
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world! - Neil Gaiman
Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians. - Neil Gaiman
If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something. - Neil Gaiman
Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus? - Neil Gaiman
I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be. - Neil Gaiman
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters. - Neil Gaiman
Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
Os deuses morrem. E, quando morrem mesmo, são esquecidos e ninguém os chora. As ideias são mais difíceis de matar do que as pessoas, mas, no fim, é possível matá-las. - Neil Gaiman
We owe it to each other to tell stories. - Neil Gaiman
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you. - Neil Gaiman
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. - Neil Gaiman
Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
When writing a novel that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: "House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day." - Neil Gaiman
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read. - Neil Gaiman
Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us. - Neil Gaiman
Hell is something you carry with you. - Neil Gaiman
The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had the chance to find out about it.-Adam to DEATH & the 4 horsepeople of the Apocalypse - Neil Gaiman
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are. - Neil Gaiman
And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him. - Neil Gaiman
The dead can't hurt you, they're dead. Living things can hurt you, living people can hurt you but the dead can't. - Neil Gaiman
When he stood up, it was a very complicated motion. If the deck chairs on the Ship to the Sea of Night had opened up, they would have done so like that. It was like he was unfolding himself forever. - Neil Gaiman
Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce. - Neil Gaiman
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard. - Neil Gaiman
Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art. - Neil Gaiman
- Neil Gaiman
Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?": "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author."[Jumbo.com, 21 August 2012] - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men. - Neil Gaiman
Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. - Neil Gaiman
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true. - Neil Gaiman
I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me? - Neil Gaiman
You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue. - Neil Gaiman
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. - Neil Gaiman
People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes. - Neil Gaiman
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories. - Neil Gaiman
I really don't know what "I love you" means.I think it means "Don't leave me here alone. - Neil Gaiman
If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. - Neil Gaiman
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)] - Neil Gaiman
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.) - Neil Gaiman
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong. - Neil Gaiman
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea? - Neil Gaiman
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. - Neil Gaiman
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. - Neil Gaiman
When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day. - Neil Gaiman
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong. - Neil Gaiman
When writing a novel that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.' - Neil Gaiman
What power would Hell have if those imprisoned there were not able to dream of Heaven? - Neil Gaiman
Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you. - Neil Gaiman
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. - Neil Gaiman
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant. - Neil Gaiman
The universe is amply supplied with night. - Neil Gaiman
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing."[The Guardian, 15 October 2013] - Neil Gaiman
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming. - Neil Gaiman
It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away. - Neil Gaiman
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. - Neil Gaiman
If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do. - Neil Gaiman
So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in. - Neil Gaiman
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose. - Neil Gaiman
And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it. - Neil Gaiman
People tend to find books when they are ready for them. - Neil Gaiman
A book is a dream you hold in your hands - Neil Gaiman
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. - Neil Gaiman
So 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. - Neil Gaiman
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. - Neil Gaiman
You have a very open relationship with your fans.""Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers. - Neil Gaiman
I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end. - Neil Gaiman
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak. - Neil Gaiman
And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art. - Neil Gaiman
To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due. - Neil Gaiman
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages. - Neil Gaiman
I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin. - Neil Gaiman
If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. - Neil Gaiman
...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people. - Neil Gaiman
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent. - Neil Gaiman
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. - Neil Gaiman
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men. - Neil Gaiman
Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished. - Neil Gaiman
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. - Neil Gaiman
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer. - Neil Gaiman