Neil Gaiman Quotes

445 Sourced Quotes

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
The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

Neil Gaiman
HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY. And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn't suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain.

Neil Gaiman
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Neil Gaiman
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself.

Neil Gaiman
It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman
They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.

Neil Gaiman
I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.

Neil Gaiman
The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don't look like much of a minstrel, and you're— pardon me for saying so lad, but it's true— ordinary as cheese crumbs. So it's love if you ask me.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman
If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse.

Neil Gaiman
When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It's scientific. That's how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.

Neil Gaiman
I thought, I'm going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

Neil Gaiman
In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there's a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is-well, it's magic, isn't it? Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.

Neil Gaiman
Do stories grow? Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes.

Neil Gaiman
What need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?

Neil Gaiman
He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.

Neil Gaiman
People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

Neil Gaiman
Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.

Neil Gaiman
She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Neil Gaiman
Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

Neil Gaiman
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
How old are you?" asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he would never have dared. "As old as my tongue," said Hunter, primly, "and a little older than my teeth.

Neil Gaiman
I'm bored," she said. "Learn how to tap-dance," he suggested, without turning around.

Neil Gaiman
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
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys.

Neil Gaiman
We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we'd written, and try to make the other one laugh. We'd plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We'd rewrite each other, footnote each other's pages, sometimes even footnote each other's footnotes.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

Neil Gaiman