Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 2

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there.

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.

Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly."Would you like one?" she asked the little dog."Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool.""I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her."Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.

I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.

The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.

I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end.

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. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.

Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.

The dread had not left my soul.

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?

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.

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.

I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.

People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark.

We have eyes and we have nervesesWe have tails we have teethYou'll all get what you deservesesWhen we rise from underneath.

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. 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.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.

After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place...

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’“ said Shadow.“Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’”“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do.”Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.

She was the storm, she was the lightning...

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.

Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time.

I think that there should have been some nice wumpires," said my sister, wistfully. "Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires.""There were not," said my father.

I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.

Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.

I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.

This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

It's a weapon, I understand?""In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is.

I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.I know a charm that will heal with a touch.I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.A fifteenth: I had a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe in my dreams.A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one know but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

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

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue...

Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.