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That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.
Neil Gaiman
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We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Neil Gaiman
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I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.
Neil Gaiman
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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
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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
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You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.
Neil Gaiman
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It's easier to kill people, when you're dead yourself, she told him. I mean, it's not such a big deal. You're not so prejudiced any more.
Neil Gaiman
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People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.
Neil Gaiman
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Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.
Neil Gaiman
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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Neil Gaiman
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Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
Neil Gaiman
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Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.
Neil Gaiman
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Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.
Neil Gaiman
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That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.
Neil Gaiman
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They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.
Neil Gaiman
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What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore 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
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Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.
Neil Gaiman
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There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
Neil Gaiman
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You're a poem?' I repeated. She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.' 'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?' 'What's your name?' 'Enn.' 'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?
Neil Gaiman
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People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.
Neil Gaiman
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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
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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
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Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.
Neil Gaiman
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Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.
Neil Gaiman
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Soon, said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.
Neil Gaiman
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Name the different kinds of people,' said Miss Lupescu. 'Now.' Bod thought for a moment. 'The living,' he said. 'Er. The dead.' He stopped. Then, '... Cats?' he offered, uncertainly.
Neil Gaiman
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I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
Neil Gaiman
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Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
Neil Gaiman
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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
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Some things may change," said Wednesday, abruptly. "People, however... People stay the same.
Neil Gaiman
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Quote of the day
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up.
Barbara Kingsolver
Neil Gaiman
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Born:
November 10, 1960
(age 64)
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