InspiringQuotes

Neil Gaiman Quotes:

Neil Gaiman quotes

Ocupation: Author

Life: b. November 10, 1960

Birthday: November 10

famous quotes

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

Topics: Inspirational, Graduation, Mistake, Inspirational Graduation, Inspire Students

quote the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you your voice your mind your story neil gaiman Quotes

I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.

Topics: School, Writing, Years

Quotation Neil Gaiman Go and make interesting mistakes make amazing mistakes make glorious Quotes

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

Topics: Dream, Character, Inspired

Quotation Neil Gaiman You re alive That means you have infinite potential You Quotes

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.

source: - "My New Year Wish" by Neil Gaiman, journal.neilgaiman.com. December 31, 2011.

Topics: New Year, Mistake, Years, Making Mistakes And Learning From Them, Trying Something New

Quotation Neil Gaiman Being brave doesn t mean you aren t scared Being Quotes

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

Topics: Speech, Patterns, Details

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like - the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature - you'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.

Topics: Children, Book, Reading, 21st Century, Love Of Reading

The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It's a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.

Topics: Mirrors, Strange, Wonderful, Seeing Yourself

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.

Topics: Graduation, Stupid, Mean, Amazing World, Sandman

I wanted to be an author as far back as I can remember, mixed with occasional bouts of wanting to be a werewolf when I grew up. But mostly, when I daydreamed, it was about being an author.

Topics: Remember, Werewolf, Grew

Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Topics: Moving, Perfection, Horizon

There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.

Topics: Art, What Matters, Culture

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

Topics: Writing, Way, Stories, Newness, Retelling

We get to experience the same thing in very different ways with different parts of ourselves.

Topics: Different, Way, Different Ways

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

Topics: Women, Book, Naked, Witchcraft, Good Omens

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.

Topics: Artist, Stories, Matching

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Topics: Inspirational, Reading, Book

I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.

source: - "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Race, Good Questions

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.

Topics: Running, Art, Husband, When Things Get Tough, Good Art

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Challenges

Libraries are our friends.

Topics: Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.

Topics: Stuff, Bricks, Clay

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Topics: Fiction, Life Is, Stranger, Stranger Than Fiction

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.

Topics: Country, Thinking, Stuff, Bookshops

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. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Mind

Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Whatever you're scared of doing, Do it.

Topics: Mistake, Scared, Made, Happy New Year, Trying New Things

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.

Topics: Virginia, People, Toasters

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

Topics: Ocean, Book, Believe, Migrate

People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick.

Topics: Kids, Thinking, Ideas

Let's start a new tomorrow, today.

source: - Neil Gaiman (2005). “Anansi Boys”

Topics: Today, Tomorrow, Now Or Never, Cherish Every Moment

I was a voracious reader and I could never understand why comics were of any less merit or importance than any other way of writing. I think the thing that keeps me with comics is there's still so much to be done. There's still this huge unplowed field, this huge unexplored wilderness, and as long as I can keep doing new things and coming up with new things, I will.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Long

[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...

Topics: Book, Healing, Hands, Buying Books, Buying Something

Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I'm not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head.

Topics: Children, Character, Ideas, Favorite Characters

The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.

Topics: Design, World, Made, Brighter

Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.

Topics: Writing, Years, People

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.

Topics: Stars, Sadness, Eye, Dark Sky, Sad Eyes

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

Topics: Eye, Thinking, Race, Sweeteners, Things Past

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

Topics: Heart, Most Romantic, Lovers, Minstrels

Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.

Topics: Eye, Fiction, Behinds

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

Topics: Love You, Mean, Thinking, Don't Leave Me, Meaning Of Love

The real world has no obligation to be convincing, so it throws up some very weird moments sometimes.

Topics: Real, World, Sometimes

You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

source: - "Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers" by Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org. September 11, 2013.

Topics: Design, Finishing

I'd love to think that people in the future would gather in theatres, at conventions, and in darkened rooms, and read it out to each other.

Topics: Thinking, People, Theatre

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

source: - Neil Gaiman (2012). “Coraline”, p.7, A&C Black

Topics: Inspirational, Cancer, Cheer Up, Coraline, Fairy Stories

I think radio plays are my favourite medium, as they make the listener work and create and contribute in a way that TV and film can never do, and they have an immediacy that written prose often lacks.

Topics: Thinking, Play, Radio, Immediacy, Radio Plays

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

Topics: Monday, Thinking, Hell, Hell On Earth

There may be a parallel between woodcuts and radio; radio plays are a living art form everywhere except the USA.

Topics: Art, Play, Usa, Radio Plays

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.

Topics: Inspiring, Dream, Memories, Lost Dreams, Lost Hope

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Topics: Ideas, Years, Sick

There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.

Topics: People, Riding, Unicorn, Stardust

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

Topics: Happiness, Whatever It Takes, Glorious

Most of what I want to try to do is continue to go places with fiction that I've never gone before, and tell stories I've never told before, and one of the problems you rapidly discover about fans is what fans want is the last thing they liked. They want more of that.

Topics: Trying, Gone, Fiction

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Topics: Inspirational, Dance, Passion, Motivational Dance, Live With Passion

The biggest pitfall to avoid is not writing. Not writing is really, really easy to do, especially if you're a young writer. The hope that elves will come in the night and finish it for you, is a very common one to have. That is my main recommendation - you have to write, and you have to finish what you write and beyond that, it's all detail.

Topics: Writing, Night, Details

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

Topics: Book, Ideas, People, Overstatement

I'm probably slightly more famous than I've been comfortable with. Famous enough to have my phone calls returned is about as famous as I want to be.

Topics: Phones, Phone Calls, Want

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.

Topics: Jobs, Writing, Winning, Blank Paper

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.

Topics: Editors, Editing, Guy

If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

Topics: Men, Cells, Years, Misdeeds

I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.

Topics: Laughing, Able, Jokes

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.

Topics: Love, Wise, Dream

I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.

Topics: Fun, Reading, Years, Squat

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

Topics: Book, Writing, Body

Human beings do not relate to written words in the same way that they will relate to spoken words. They do not relate to music in the same way that they do to pictures. It's all different parts of our head, different parts of our minds processing this.

Topics: Mind, Way, Different

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

source: - Neil Gaiman (2009). “The Graveyard Book”, p.189, A&C Black

Topics: Life And Love, Pain, Path, Buried Treasure

The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi.

Topics: Nice, Book, Numbers, Signing

I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work.

Topics: Next, May, Want

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.

source: - "Fictional character: Narrator". "Stardust", m.imdb.com. 2007.

Topics: Stars, Philosopher, Humans, Star Gazing, Stardust

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

Topics: Couple, Book, Writing

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

Topics: Book, Reading, Thought Provoking, Libraries And Librarians, Public Library

I like comic conventions. I genuinely like comic conventions. I like wandering around from table to table; I like wandering up and down Artist's Alley and saying "Hello" to people. I like hanging out on the DC booth. I can't do that anymore. I'd like to, but I can't. I physically can't. If I stop moving, somebody will come up to me with something to sign, and if I sign it, somehow it's like ants sensing sugar. There will be fifty or a hundred people around me and then fire marshals will come and then I'm trapped in a crowd. It's bizarre.

Topics: Moving, Artist, Fire, Saying Hello, Alleys

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

Topics: Dream, Angel, Heart

In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.

Topics: Looks, Like You, Novel

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

Topics: Interesting, World, Break

People who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

source: - Neil Gaiman (2009). “The Graveyard Book”, p.63, A&C Black

Topics: Life, Believe, People

I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.

Topics: Giving, The End Of The Day, Needs

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

Topics: Real, Fiction, Doe

I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.

Topics: People, Rewriting, Facts, Scarecrow

Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?

Topics: Dog, Fun, People, Hot Dog

I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.

Topics: Facts, Stores, Streets

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Topics: Truth, Science, Fool, Prerogative, Sandman

I'm somebody who considers happiness a journey, not a destination.

Topics: Journey, Destination

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.

Topics: Beach, Writing, Sky, Oak Tree

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

Topics: Firsts, Looks, Strange, Artifacts

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour.

Topics: Stars, Journey, Rocks

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

Topics: Ideas, World, Love Making, Building Things

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

Topics: Children, Kids, Parent

I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I'm not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, "But he was really good at that. Why isn't he still doing it?"

Topics: Leaving, Trying, Fans

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.

Topics: Party, Home, Good Times, Mingling

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

Topics: Successful, Talking, People, Fiction Novels, Historical Fiction

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.

Topics: Lonely, Teenager, Kids

I'm willing to make a fool out of myself in public. I'm also willing to make those mistakes that you're going to make the first time you go out, so hopefully the next time it will be better.

Topics: Mistake, Next, Fool

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Topics: Writing, Needs, Stories

One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.

Topics: Character, White, Race

Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.

Topics: Phoenix, Doe, Lost, Descending

Twitter is great and it's glorious and it's easy, but if somebody comes up with something kind of like Twitter tomorrow, that's better or smarter or more useful, in three weeks time, Twitter could more or less be history because that's how fast things go.

Topics: Three, Tomorrow, Kind

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Fall, Sandman

I have never written a musical. I have never written a weird, interactive piece of theater. I wanted to do something that would be disturbing. It will be disturbing theater with songs. There will be no people on wires. That's probably the next one of those things on my bucket list of things that I need to write before I get hit by that car.

Topics: Song, Writing, Car, The Next One, Bucket List

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?" "Stories. And they give me hope.

Topics: Giving, Stories, Fundamentals, Fundamental Principles

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

Topics: Love, Morning, Eye, Way I Love You

China was the most optimistic place I'd ever been. Everybody I met was pretty much convinced that their children would have it better than their parents had had it. It was like being in America in the 1950's, with this deep optimism about the future because everything was getting better, and that fascinated me.

Topics: Children, Optimistic, America

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

Topics: Lying, Writing, Stories, Good Lies, True Things

I don't think about age groups when I write, although I think if I know I'm writing for Children I'll be a bit more ambitious, and think more about every word, because I know that they pay closer attention when they read than adults do.

Topics: Children, Writing, Thinking

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

Topics: Sanctuary, Lasts, Violence

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.

Topics: Writing, Scripts, Diagrams, Writing Scripts

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Topics: Life, People, Tragedy, Good Omens, Omen

In Hollywood, lying is something that people do like breathing.

Topics: Lying, Breathing, People

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Topics: War, Believe, Humility, American Gods

The trouble with everything, these days, for me, is time. There is only one me. There are a ridiculous number of demands on my time. There are so many things I'm trying to do. It's so much more about when I'm going to get time to do it, if I get time.

Topics: Numbers, Trying, Demand

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Topics: Choices, Path, Sometimes, Sandman

I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

Topics: Positive, Men, Miserable

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Topics: Life, Inspirational Life, Lifetime

People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghost, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.

Topics: Life, Believe, Responsibility, Electrons, American Gods

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

source: - Neil Gaiman (2005). “Anansi Boys”

Topics: Song, Voice, Justice

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

Topics: Good Day, Cat, Writing

I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

Topics: Kings, Cat, Owning A Pet, Inspirational Cat, Cat Love

Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.

Topics: Sex, Two, People, Borrowed, Raspberries

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 fooling a soul.

Topics: Book, Soul, May, Bookshops, American Gods

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Topics: Sweet, Long, House, American Gods

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 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.

Topics: Morning, Men, Tangled, Morning Dew, Long Legs

I don't know. I had to be something, didn't I?

Some hats can only be worn if you're willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you're only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.

Topics: Spring, Dancing, Demand

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Topics: Children, Names, Mountain

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

Topics: Problem

You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

Topics: Special, Helping, Unfair, Limes

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

Topics: Children, Parenting, Age, Mortification, Cringe

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

Topics: Writing, Fantasy, Now And Then, Magic Realism, Magical Realism

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.

Topics: Inspiring, Creativity, Writing, Inspiration To Write

While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe.

Topics: Men, Clothes, Bird, Fine Feathers

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Topics: Believe, Cat, Deserve

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

Topics: Inspiring, Dream, Lost, Lost Dreams

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Topics: Love, Memories, Philosophy, American Gods

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

Topics: Dream, Writing, Flying

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.

Topics: Dream, Heart, Desire, Sandman

You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

Topics: Dream, Mean, Names, Infinite Potential

You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies.

Topics: Kings, Believe, Boys

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

Topics: Love, Dream, Heart, Fragile Things, Fragile

I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?

Topics: Fun, Mean, Want, Coraline

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.

Topics: Miserable, Grumpy, Produce, Disparity

Even nothing cannot last forever.

Topics: Forever, Lasts

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.

Topics: Eye, Passion, Thinking

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Topics: Stories, Storytelling

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Topics: Book, World, Cheaper

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Topics: Time, Way, Discouraging

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.

Topics: Song, Pain, Wine, Three Things

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Topics: Children, Bored, Simplicity, Charcoal

But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them.

Topics: Winter, Names, Yellow

Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.

Topics: Brave, Scared, Said, Coraline

Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

Topics: Jobs, People, Encounters, Awesomeness, Frontline

She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

Topics: Real, Cat, Grandmother, Armchairs, Late Afternoon

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Topics: Dream, Children, Ocean, Fragile Things, Intangible

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

Topics: Advice, Poet, Sensible

You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

Topics: Heart, Safe, Sometimes, Good Heart

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.

Topics: People, Looks, Half, Imaginary Lines

A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.

Topics: Couple, Heart, Insightful, Magic Tricks

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

Topics: Inspirational, Dream, Book, Inspiring Book, Books And Reading

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Topics: Sweet, Coffee, Night

I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.

Topics: Cutting, Editors, Scripts, Sandman

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

Topics: People, World, Want

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Topics: Dare

Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?

Topics: Choices, Tea, Kind, Armageddon

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

Topics: Glasses, Light, Car, Drapes

Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.

Topics: Bud

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...

Topics: Real, Moving, Eye, Gliding

There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.

Topics: Rain, Clouds, Coraline, Rain Clouds

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Topics: Cities, Healthy, London, Keynes, Birmingham

Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')

Topics: Dream, Hope, Heart, Trust Your Heart

I'll find you. Don't worry. Just be on your own and I'll find you.

Topics: Worry

It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

Topics: Nice, Chocolate, Tea, Reliable Sources

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

Topics: Believe, Boys, Men, American Gods

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

Topics: Dream, Forever, Unforgettable

There's none so blind as those who will not listen.

Topics: Blind, Stubbornness, American Gods

The best thing—in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

Topics: Men, Yesterday, Worry, American Gods

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

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Believe

If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say, 'I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love.' She is whispering that, and she whispers, 'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.

Topics: Kissing, Night, Cities

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

Topics: Song, People, Shapes

Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it.

Topics: Tea, Biscuits, Moments, Satanist

We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.

Topics: Choices, Our Actions, Accepting, Consequences Of Our Actions

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.

Topics: People, Darkness, Ghost

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

Topics: Lying, Dust, Credit, Thick, Jackals

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

Topics: Heart, Eye, Mirrors

Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?

Topics: Believe, Thinking, Fifteen

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commits acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.

Topics: Names, Devil, Sitting, Blame Me

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Topics: Dream, Heart, May

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

Topics: Lines, Looks, Destination, Parting, Failed Relationship

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Topics: Travel

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

Topics: Dream, Heart, Stories

I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in betweens.

Topics: Airplane

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

Topics: Numbers, Path, Avoiding

The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.

Topics: Giving, Advice, Scared

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

Topics: Nine, Doe, Demon

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

Topics: Loyalty, Elephants, Leader, Lieutenants

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Topics: Civilization, Two, Four, Barbarity, Civil Society

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.

Topics: Dream, Moving, Dark

When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.

Topics: Angel, Remember, Lucifer

Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.

Topics: Mean, Ideas, Two, Three Times

The world is always ending for someone

Topics: World

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.

Topics: Mistake, Important, Pieces

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.

Topics: Book, Kids, Funeral, Bar Mitzvah

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Topics: Writing, Night, Stories

You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.

Topics: What Matters, Battle, Outcomes

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