Neil Gaiman
234 quotes
Biography
"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
"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."
"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something."
"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."
"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."
"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something."
"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."
"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."
"People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."
"What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul."
"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."
"Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't."
"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."
"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."
"She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars."
"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men."
"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot."
"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
"You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime."
"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right"we whisper, "I'm here, I love you."and we lie: "I'll never leave you."For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."
"In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again."