Best 1490 quotes of Neil Gaiman on MyQuotes

Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life....As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible.

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem...

'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.

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.

Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')

[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.

Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden.

Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future.

Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.

Dreams shape the world

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.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

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

Even the proudest spirit can be broken with love.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole 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.

Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story.

Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

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.

Fear is contagious. You can catch it.

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.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

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.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

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.

Firstly, there no such person as Death. Second, Death's this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with Scandinavians. Third, he doesn't exist either.

First rule of magic: Don't let anyone know your real name. Names have power.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done.

For tea she went down to see Misses Spink and Forcible. She had three digestive biscuits, a glass of limeade, and a cup of weak tea. The limeade was very interesting. It didn't taste anything like limes. It tasted bright green and vaguely chemical. Coraline liked it enormously. She wished they had it at home. "How are your dear mother and father?" asked Miss Spink. "Missing," said Coraline. "I haven't seen either of them since yesterday. I'm on my own. I think I've probably become a single child family.

For the record, I don't expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I'm a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.

Freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.

Go get your heart broken.