Neil Gaiman Quotes And Sayings

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book.

I Started Out Writing Much More Science Fictiony Stuff And Writing About Science Fiction.

In Many Ways, It Was Much, Much Harder To Get The First Book Contract. The Hardest Thing Probably Overall Has Been Learning Not To Trust People, Publicists And So Forth, Implicitly.

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.

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.

It's A Wonderful Thing, As A Writer, To Be Given Parameters And Walls And Barriers.

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.

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.

Short Stories Are Tiny Windows Into Other Worlds And Other Minds And Dreams. They Are Journeys You Can Make To The Far Side Of The Universe And Still Be Back In Time For Dinner.

A Library Is A Place That Is A Repository Of Information And Gives Every Citizen Equal Access To It. That Includes Health Information. And Mental Health Information. It's A Community Space. It's A Place Of Safety, A Haven From The World.

Empathy Is A Tool For Building People Into Groups, For Allowing Us To Function As More Than Self-obsessed Individuals.

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've Never Known Anyone Who Was What He Or She Seemed; Or At Least, Was Only What He Or She Seemed. People Carry Worlds Within Them.

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.

The Imagination Is A Muscle. If It Is Not Exercised, It Atrophies.

Sometimes The Best Way To Learn Something Is By Doing It Wrong And Looking At What You Did.

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.

This Is A Work Of Fiction. All The Characters In It, Human And Otherwise, Are Imaginary, Excepting Only Certain Of The Fairy Folk, Whom It Might Be Unwise To Offend By Casting Doubts On Their Existence. Or Lack Thereof.

And There Never Was An Apple, In Adam's Opinion, That Wasn't Worth The Trouble You Got Into For Eating It.

A Nice, Easy Place For Freedom Of Speech To Be Eroded Is Comics, Because Comics Are A Natural Target Whenever An Election Comes Up.

You Get Ideas From Daydreaming. You Get Ideas From Being Bored. You Get Ideas All The Time. The Only Difference Between Writers And Other People Is We Notice When We're Doing It.

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've Been Blogging Since February Of 2001. When I Started Blogging, It Was A Dinosaur Blog. It Was Me And A Handful Of Tyrannosaurs. We'd Be Writing Blog Entries Like, 'The Tyrannosaurus Is Getting Grumpy.'

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.

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.

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.

As A Kid, I Would Get My Parents To Drop Me Off At My Local Library On Their Way To Work During The Summer Holidays, And I Would Walk Home At Night. For Several Years, I Read The Children's Library Until I Finished The Children's Library. Then I Moved Into The Adult Library And Slowly Worked My Way Through Them.

I've Known Ambitious People With No Aptitude For The Thing They Did. Most Of Whom, Rather Terrifyingly, Tended To Succeed.

I Think The Short Story Is A Very Underrated Art Form. We Know That Novels Deserve Respect.

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.

Life Is Always Going To Be Stranger Than Fiction, Because Fiction Has To Be Convincing, And Life Doesn't.

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 Lost Some Time Once. It's Always In The Last Place You Look For It.

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.

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.

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.

Make Good Art.

It Is A Fool's Prerogative To Utter Truths That No One Else Will Speak.

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.

I Wish Being A Beekeeper, Which I Am, Gave You A Free Pass On The Carbon Footprint, But It Doesn't.

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.

I'm A Fairly Undisciplined Writer.

Also, I've Already Won All The Awards.

Life - And I Don't Suppose I'm The First To Make This Comparison - Is A Disease: Sexually Transmitted, And Invariably Fatal.

Rock And Roll Stars Have It Much Better Than Writers When They're On A Tour.

The World Always Seems Brighter When You've Just Made Something That Wasn't There Before.

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.

The Biggest Difference Between England And America Is That England Has History, While America Has Geography.

When I Was 7, My Proudest Possession Would Have Been My Bookshelf 'Cause I Had Alphabetized All Of The Books On My Bookshelf.

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.

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.