Top 70 Neil Gaiman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist – a wonderful thing for a writer.

Every now and then I’ll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn’t have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I’m sure there are words that are simply in there ’cause I like them. I know I couldn’t justify each and every one of them.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

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.

The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked… that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

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.

Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.

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.

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.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

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.

With ‘Stardust’, I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.

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

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.

I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.

The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don’t have that.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

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.

What I’d love to do is every now and then go, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got this amazing idea for ‘Doctor Who.’

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

‘American Gods’ was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there’s definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.

Continuity isn’t actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don’t use it where you don’t need to.

Also, I’ve already won all the awards.

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.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

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.

I’ve known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.

I kept starting ‘Anansi Boys’ as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with ‘American Gods’ is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

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.

I don’t think I’m mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.

I want to write a play. I’d like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

You know, it’s weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you’ve never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.

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.

‘Doctor Who’ was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.

Life – and I don’t suppose I’m the first to make this comparison – is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

I wish being a beekeeper, which I am, gave you a free pass on the carbon footprint, but it doesn’t.

I think of myself as a very lazy author.

It’s a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it’s not something I find terribly important.

I lost some time once. It’s always in the last place you look for it.

I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I’ve written.

The joy of doing ‘Sandman’ was doing a comic and telling people, ‘No, it has an end,’ at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you’d finished.

As an author, I’ve never forgotten how to daydream.

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn’t taste like anything much.

I’m a fairly undisciplined writer.

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.

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

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’m never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.

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.