Neil Gaiman 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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Inspirational #Graduation #Mistake

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#School #Writing #Years

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

#Dream #Mean #Alive

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

#Dream #Character #Inspired

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#New Year #Mistake #Years

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Children #Book #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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Mirrors #Strange #Wonderful

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Graduation #Stupid #Mean

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Remember #Werewolf #Grew

Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Art #What Matters #Culture

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

#Writing #Way #Stories

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

#Different #Way

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

#Women #Book #Naked

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Artist #Stories #Matching

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Writing #Thinking #Race

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Running #Art #Husband

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Writing #Thinking #Challenges

Libraries are our friends.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Stuff #Bricks #Clay

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

#Fiction #Life Is #Stranger

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Country #Thinking #Stuff

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Inspirational #Life #Mind

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

#Mistake #Scared #Made

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Ocean #Book #Believe

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Kids #Thinking #Ideas

Let's start a new tomorrow, today.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Today #Tomorrow

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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...
-- Neil Gaiman

#Book #Healing #Hands

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Children #Character #Ideas

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

#Design #World #Made

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Stars #Sadness #Eye

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Eye #Thinking #Race

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

#Heart #Most Romantic #Lovers

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

#Eye #Fiction #Behinds

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

#Love You #Mean #Thinking

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

#Real #World #Sometimes

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Inspirational #Cancer #Cheer Up

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Thinking #Play #Radio

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

#Monday #Thinking #Hell

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

#Art #Play #Usa

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Inspiring #Dream #Memories

"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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#People #Riding #Unicorn

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Inspirational #Dance #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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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?
-- Neil Gaiman

#Book #Ideas #People

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Jobs #Writing #Winning

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Men #Cells #Years

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Fun #Reading #Years

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Mind #Way #Different

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

#Life And Love #Pain #Path

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Nice #Book #Numbers

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So 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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Writing #Needs #Stories

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Stars #Philosopher #Humans

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Couple #Book #Writing

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

#Book #Reading #Thought Provoking

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Moving #Artist #Fire

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Looks #Like You #Novel

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Giving #The End Of The Day #Needs

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#People #Rewriting #Facts

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

#Dog #Fun #People

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Facts #Stores #Streets

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

#Truth #Science #Fool

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Beach #Writing #Sky

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Firsts #Looks #Strange

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

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Ideas #World #Love Making

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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?"
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Party #Home #Good Times

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Successful #Talking #People

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Character #White #Race

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

#Phoenix #Doe #Lost

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Three #Tomorrow #Kind

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

#Inspirational #Life #Fall

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.
-- Neil Gaiman

#Song #Writing #Car

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

#Giving #Stories #Fundamentals