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Neil Gaiman Quotes
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Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book . In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. November 1960  •  Other names Neil Richard Gaiman
Neil Gaiman photo
Neil Gaiman: 108 quotes39 likes

Neil Gaiman Quotes

“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations.”

Neil Gaiman

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

“We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.”

Neil Gaiman book Coraline

Coraline (2002)

“On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods. The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of the them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight.”

Neil Gaiman

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 276)

“Why do I have this imagination? It's the only one I've got!”

Neil Gaiman

San Diego Comicon (2007)

“Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way Scarlett had held him and how safe he felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.”

Neil Gaiman book The Graveyard Book

Source: The Graveyard Book (2008), Ch. 7

“Kate Bush makes a record, and you don’t hear from her. And you play the stuff she has made, and one day you are surprised, and she brings out something else, and she's been quietly working away on it, for however long she wanted to work on it, and I love that. I love the willingness to be quiet, until its time to speak — which is something that she does over and over.”

Neil Gaiman

The Kate Bush Story (2014)

“Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from
one's lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

Neil Gaiman

"Instructions", first published in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales (2000) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

“Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”

Neil Gaiman

Death Talks About Life (January 1993)

“It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. You have failed.”

Neil Gaiman

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 278)

“Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, "I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent." And I said, "Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something."”

Neil Gaiman

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did.
http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-that-youve-dealt-with-with-impostor (2017)

“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say "what kind of tea?"”

Neil Gaiman

In a widely reported post https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22Honestly,%20if%20you're%20given%20the%20choice%20between%20Armageddon%20or%20tea,%20you%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 from his Twitter account (25 February 2009) https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1250594057

“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.”

Neil Gaiman book Fragile Things

From Bitter Grounds
Fragile Things (2006)

“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.”

Neil Gaiman The Sandman

The Sandman

“It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn't cloudy or raining.”

Neil Gaiman book Anansi Boys

Source: Anansi Boys (2005), Ch. 9

“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

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”

Neil Gaiman

"somewhat less sinister ducks" Blog entry (23 April 2004) http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/04/somewhat-less-sinister-ducks.asp

“The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading…It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”

Neil Gaiman

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

“I don't know what it's like to be God — obviously …until that very first moment when you get to sit down and type the words in your script: INTERIOR. TARDIS. … Suddenly I got a very good idea of what it must feel like. I went: "I'm writing it now this scene in the Tardis. I'm writing it!"”

Neil Gaiman

And that was amazing, it was wonderful. <br class="br">On writing the script for the episode of Doctor Who, &quot;The Doctor&#x27;s Wife&quot; (originally titled &quot;House of Nothing&quot;), as quoted in &quot;Neil Gaiman reveals power of writing Doctor Who&quot; by Tim Masters at BBC News (24 May 2010) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10146657

“I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing… I've always loved the gutter.”

Neil Gaiman

Response to a question about the increasing critical acceptance of fantasy writing, in a Radio interview, Studio 360 http://www.studio360.org/yore/show100105.html show 640, originally broadcast (1 October 2005)

“He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”

Neil Gaiman book Neverwhere

Source: Neverwhere (1996), Chapter 16

“Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.”

Neil Gaiman book Coraline

Coraline (2002)

“"You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.”

Neil Gaiman book Anansi Boys

Source: Anansi Boys (2005), Ch. 12

“Have a nice doomsday.”

Neil Gaiman

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

Neil Gaiman

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

“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 unshakably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 14 (p. 207)

“We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 10 (p. 152)

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

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 10 (p. 151)

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 6 (p. 77)

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 6 (p. 74)

“I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 6 (p. 69)

“I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?”

Neil Gaiman book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 3 (p. 37)

“And our latest project was Death. It’s one of the hard ones—one of the big ones, too, I suspect. Possibly it may even become the attribute that’s going to define the Creation for the Created: If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning—a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross...”

Neil Gaiman book Smoke and Mirrors

Murder Mysteries (p. 312)
Smoke and Mirrors (1998)

“Even the better protected files corrupt,
and the best protected corrupt absolutely.”

Neil Gaiman book Smoke and Mirrors

Cold Colors (p. 239)
Smoke and Mirrors (1998)

“It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History.”

Neil Gaiman book Smoke and Mirrors

The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories (p. 107)
Smoke and Mirrors (1998)

“It can’t make things any worse.”

Neil Gaiman book Fragile Things

“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend.
From A Study in Emerald
Fragile Things (2006)

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

Neil Gaiman

Source: The Kindly Ones (v češtině Blahovolné) ze série Sandman