Neil Gaiman (Writer)

What most people don't know about , , and relations with otherbeings would fill a book … I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic.

— Neil Gaiman people

I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.

— Neil Gaiman life

Behind everysentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put , you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

— Neil Gaiman art

— Neil Gaiman words

Everybody has a secretinside of them.of theof 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.

— Neil Gaiman world

It has always been the prerogative ofand 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 wit

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

— Neil Gaiman sex

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.

— Neil Gaiman love

You getfrom 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.

— Neil Gaiman time

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

— Neil Gaiman action

You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of their leading ladies, and 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.

— Neil Gaiman science

Do not be jealous of your sister.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.

— Neil Gaiman you

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.

— Neil Gaiman man

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

— Neil Gaiman world

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

— Neil Gaiman writing

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

— Neil Gaiman love

Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing. And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.

— Neil Gaiman life

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

— Neil Gaiman love

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.

— Neil Gaiman words

I wish I had an origin story for you. When I was four, I was bitten by a radioactive myth.

— Neil Gaiman story

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.

— Neil Gaiman life

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

— Neil Gaiman imagination

Honestly, if you're given the choice betweenor , you don't say "what kind of tea?"

— Neil Gaiman choice

Off to bed. If squirrels take over in the night, I, for one, welcome our new bushy-tailed scampering overlords, & I know where the nuts are.

— Neil Gaiman night

I don't know what it's like to be— obviously …until that very first moment when you get to sit down and type the words in your script: INTERIOR. . … Suddenly I got a very good idea of what it must feel like. I went: "I'm writing it now this scene in the Tardis. I'm writing it!" And that was amazing, it was wonderful.

— Neil Gaiman writing

has never pretended to be hard science fiction … At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem.

— Neil Gaiman science

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.

— Neil Gaiman world

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.

— Neil Gaiman man

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.

— Neil Gaiman women

The world is always ending, for someone.

— Neil Gaiman world

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.

— Neil Gaiman believe

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.

— Neil Gaiman men

“You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.”

— Neil Gaiman time

Unimpressed was his default state.

— Neil Gaiman

“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”

— Neil Gaiman violence

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

— Neil Gaiman world

"The little folk dare anything," said his friend. "And they talks 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."

— Neil Gaiman you

These are just two samples, for more from this work see

— Neil Gaiman work

"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."

— Neil Gaiman you

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.

— Neil Gaiman body

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.

— Neil Gaiman people

These are just a few samples, for more quotations from this work see

— Neil Gaiman work

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.

— Neil Gaiman world

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.

— Neil Gaiman war

These are just a few samples, for more from this work see

— Neil Gaiman work

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

— Neil Gaiman reality

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

— Neil Gaiman rain

"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.

— Neil Gaiman help

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

— Neil Gaiman horror

I think... I would rather recollect amisspent on fragile things than spent avoidingdebt.

— Neil Gaiman think

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.

— Neil Gaiman smile

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.

— Neil Gaiman world

And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago.

— Neil Gaiman time

She does not know where any tale waits before it's told. (No more do I.) But forty thieves sounds good, so forty thieves it is. She prays she has bought another clutch of days. We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

— Neil Gaiman good

My grandpa sells condoms to sailors, He punctures the tips with a pin, My grandma does back-street abortions, My god how the money rolls in.

— Neil Gaiman god

If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to beororany more. Whole different set of . , not checkers. , not chess. You understand?

— Neil Gaiman you

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.

— Neil Gaiman time

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

— Neil Gaiman world

Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.

— Neil Gaiman men

Bod said, "I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused, and thought. "I want everything."

— Neil Gaiman life

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.

— Neil Gaiman hope

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.

— Neil Gaiman mind

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.

— Neil Gaiman science

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.

— Neil Gaiman men

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

— Neil Gaiman time

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

— Neil Gaiman life

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.

— Neil Gaiman children

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.

— Neil Gaiman love

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 truth

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.

— Neil Gaiman time

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 world

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

— Neil Gaiman people

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

— Neil Gaiman world

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.

— Neil Gaiman people

I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.

— Neil Gaiman world

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

— Neil Gaiman time

The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.

— Neil Gaiman truth

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

— Neil Gaiman children

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.

— Neil Gaiman stories

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

— Neil Gaiman sex

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

— Neil Gaiman people

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.'

— Neil Gaiman writing

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.

— Neil Gaiman time

In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.

— Neil Gaiman people

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

— Neil Gaiman you

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. Youre doing things youve never done before, and more importantly, youre doing something.

— Neil Gaiman hope

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.

— Neil Gaiman

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

— Neil Gaiman path

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

— Neil Gaiman life

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

— Neil Gaiman believe

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

— Neil Gaiman hell

I really don’t know what I love you means. I think it means don’t leave me here alone.

— Neil Gaiman love

Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

— Neil Gaiman love

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

— Neil Gaiman imagination

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