Top 1224 Quotes & Sayings by Neil Gaiman - Page 19

Use your blog to connect. Use it as you. Don’t ‘network’ or ‘promote.’ Just talk.

I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them--which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it.

Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

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.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

It's quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.' 'No radio waves,' said the Doctor. 'Not even Radio Four.' 'You can hear radio waves?' 'Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,' he said unconvincingly.

I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time.

When things get tough... Make good art.

Where magic is concerned, there is always an initial decision, an initial willingness to let it enter your life. If that is not there neither is magic.

You mourn, for it is proper to mourn. But your grief serves you; you do not become a slave to grief. You bid the dead farewell, and you continue.

Without dreams, there could be no despair.

If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do.

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

I love religion. I could make up religions all day. I sort of think that in an ideal world I'd like to be a religion designer. I'd like people come up to me and say, I need a religion. I'd go talk to them for a while, and I'd design a religion for them. That would be a great job. There's a need for people like that. Fortunately, seeing that one can't actually do it, I get paid for sort of making them up anyway.

The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

Identity can be so gelatinous sometimes.

You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else.

When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

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.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman.

And so there is magic.

Death is the second oldest of the Endless. It's hard not to love her. She loves you, after all.

I wish I could Buy Time - just write a cheque, and a few days later a brown cardboard box would arrive at the door containing three months (along with an extra bonus sunny weekend for being a good customer).

If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.

Libraries really are the gates to the future.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.

When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget.

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

I learned to write by writing.

Freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.

You can't make me love you.

Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend.

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.

I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.

I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.

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

With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."

There are people you do not want to upset in the world - the politically disenfranchized who feel they have nothing to lose, those who feel that the time has come for revolution ... then out on the edges beyond any of those are science fiction fans whose favorite show has been canceled in an untimely way.

I used to get my best ideas from being bored, and now, if I even think I'm being faintly bored, I have two million Twitter followers I can engage with. It's great, but I also think it's important to be able to let your thoughts flow and percolate.

I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...

Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.

I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.

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

Leave no path untaken.

I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something's in the world that wasn't there before.

But surely "Argh" is the sound of a sort of strangulated scream. "Aargh" is the sound of a stabbing, or a falling off a cliff. "Arr" is, I think, the noise you're looking for. It's the noise pirates make when they don't have anything better to do. "Arr, Jim Lad" = Pirate noise. "Aargh, Jim Lad" = sound of pirate falling off a cliff.

People are icebergs. So much of us is underneath.