Top 1224 Quotes & Sayings by Neil Gaiman - Page 2

I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.

I'm English, and 'Doctor Who' was this thing that I've been watching since I was three.

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.

The joy of doing 'Sandman' was doing a comic and telling people, 'No, it has an end,' at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you'd finished.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.

Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

Oh, tweeting prolifically is the most easy thing in the world. Tweeting prolifically is like somebody saying, 'Boy, you're a really good walker around,' you know. It's not really hard.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

I think of myself as a very lazy author.

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.

I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.

Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.

I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.

When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn't do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn't do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared.

For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

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

The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

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.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.

I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

I really don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.

You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.

Being brave doesn't mean you aren't scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

Go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.