Top 1224 Quotes & Sayings by Neil Gaiman - Page 15

I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it's taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department.

She didn't have a daddy?" I asked. "No." "Did you have a daddy?" "You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.

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.

Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

In order for stories to work - for kids and for adults - they should scare. And you should triumph. There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary.

Truly life is wasted on the living.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

I have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

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

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think?

Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

Now Coraline," said Miss Spink, "what's your name?" "Coraline," said Coraline. "And we don't know each other, do we?" Coraline looked at the thin young woman with black button eyes and shook her head slowly.

Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it.

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.

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.

I'm never quite sure if I'm me when I'm dressed up.

She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.

It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.

I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

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.

[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.

What would be the fun in doing things you know are going to work?

When I was about ten my favourite article in the huge and mouldering Encyclopedia Britannica we owned (the ninth edition) was the one on Lycanthropy. (Yes, I had a favourite 1890s Britannica article when I was ten. I am now aware this is not entirely usual.)

Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.

Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.

Nobody's seen Jesus in years.

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.

I do not threaten, I merely advise caution.

I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than 'Pass the salt' or 'If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?'

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

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

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.

Nothin’ wrong with witchfinding. I’d like to be a witchfinder. It’s just, well, you’ve got to take it in turns. Today we’ll go out witchfinding, an’ tomorrow we could hide, an’ it’d be the witches’ turn to find US.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called.

I am the most unhappy soul alive." "I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls." "Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine.

Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's.

Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted.

I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

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.

On the first day Coraline's family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.

It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.

He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.

There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.

Here, far from our homes, we will be forgotten by our gods.