Neil Gaiman Quotes

445 Sourced Quotes

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Neil Gaiman
Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Neil Gaiman
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Neil Gaiman
Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

Neil Gaiman
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Neil Gaiman
Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

Neil Gaiman
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Neil Gaiman
You wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so t here wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an 'I.' No point of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and of points...

Neil Gaiman
There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

Neil Gaiman
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

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
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
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
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
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
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
It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.

Neil Gaiman
Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

Neil Gaiman
Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

Neil Gaiman
It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

Neil Gaiman
Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

Neil Gaiman
If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

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

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

Neil Gaiman