Neil Gaiman Quotes

445 Sourced Quotes

"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
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.

Neil Gaiman
He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

Neil Gaiman
I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?

Neil Gaiman
It's not the fish you catch, it's the peace of mind you take home at the end of the day.

Neil Gaiman
Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Neil Gaiman
We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman
The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

Neil Gaiman
It's quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.' 'No radio waves,' said the Doctor. 'Not even Radio Four.' 'You can hear radio waves?' 'Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,' he said unconvincingly.

Neil Gaiman
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.

Neil Gaiman
The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...

Neil Gaiman
Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city -- here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call.

Neil Gaiman
The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.

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.

Neil Gaiman
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

Neil Gaiman
Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

Neil Gaiman
London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.

Neil Gaiman
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.

Neil Gaiman
I think you're doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You're growing a new heart, for a start.

Neil Gaiman
Even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked.

Neil Gaiman
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

Neil Gaiman
There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

Neil Gaiman
That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman