Neil Gaiman Quotes

445 Sourced Quotes

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

Neil Gaiman
But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

Neil Gaiman
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

Neil Gaiman
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

Neil Gaiman
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

Neil Gaiman
He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass

Neil Gaiman
There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

Neil Gaiman
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they're scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too.

Neil Gaiman
Whatever's happening," she said, eventually, "it can all be sorted out." She saw the expression on my face then, worried. Scared even. And she said, "After pancakes.

Neil Gaiman
The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are...so make up your own rules.

Neil Gaiman
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

Neil Gaiman
This little piggy went to Hades This little piggy stayed home This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh This little piggy violated virgins And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top

Neil Gaiman
Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It's because spiders think this is funny, and they don't want you ever to forget them.

Neil Gaiman
I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

Neil Gaiman
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
People who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Neil Gaiman
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that?

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

Neil Gaiman
He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

Neil Gaiman
Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

Neil Gaiman
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.

Neil Gaiman
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?' 26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.' 27 And the Lord did not ask him again.

Neil Gaiman
Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

Neil Gaiman
Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him.
I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.

Neil Gaiman
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.

Neil Gaiman
Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

Neil Gaiman
I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

Neil Gaiman
It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

Neil Gaiman
Now me, said Mr. Vandemar. What number am I thinking of? I beg your pardon? What number am I thinking of? repeated Mr. Vandemar. It's between one and a lot, he added, helpfully.

Neil Gaiman
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