Top 100 Neil Gaiman Quotes
#1. Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen.
I see you as a code to be broken, or a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jig-saw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of my own life.
Neil Gaiman
#2. It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud.
Neil Gaiman
#3. It's funny. I thought she'd live through anything."
Charlie said, "Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.
Neil Gaiman
#4. I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
Neil Gaiman
#5. Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun.
Neil Gaiman
#6. Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"
"No, Matthew. What do they say?"
"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Neil Gaiman
#7. Nobody is ever given more to shoulder than he or she can bear.
Neil Gaiman
#8. He loved me. I do not doubt that. In hindsight, I do not believe that I loved him. I simply felt his love for me, burning and all-consuming, and reflected it back, as the cold light of the moon reflects the light of the sun. I did not know that at the time. I thought I loved him.
Neil Gaiman
#9. I'm never quite sure if I'm me when I'm dressed up.
Neil Gaiman
#10. It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having.
Neil Gaiman
#11. Fat Charlie thought it highly likely that Rosie's mum went out at night in bat form to suck the blood from sleeping innocents. He had mentioned this theory to Rosie once, but she had failed to see the humor in it. Rosie
Neil Gaiman
#12. I need to know how you did it it.
I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, witch panache and style. That's how I did it.
(Shadow & Mad Sweeney)
Neil Gaiman
#13. Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled.
Neil Gaiman
#14. When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.
Neil Gaiman
#15. Most of us only find our own voice after sounding like a lot of other people
Neil Gaiman
#16. 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.
Neil Gaiman
#18. I don't think even Gran could take it out of you without hurting your heart. And you need your heart.
Neil Gaiman
#19. I think you're very nice. I think twinkle's a nice word. So's viridian. I met a lady once who had an imaginary fish.
Neil Gaiman
#20. Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.
Neil Gaiman
#22. Silver chains come in all shapes and sizes.
Neil Gaiman
#23. 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?
Neil Gaiman
#24. Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see the night sky and stars.
Neil Gaiman
#25. Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?
Neil Gaiman
#26. People gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They want to know they matter.
Neil Gaiman
#27. Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.
Neil Gaiman
#28. Ohhh. Humanity, I Love You. You never cease to amaze me. This has been amusing, little ghost, and that was not something I expected. But every playtime must come to an end. This dream is over.
- "Playing House" From THE SANDMAN #12
Neil Gaiman
#29. Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening.
Neil Gaiman
#30. All we have to believe 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.
Neil Gaiman
#31. Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross.
Neil Gaiman
#32. I am anti-life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds ... of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"
"I am hope.
Neil Gaiman
#33. Further movements are not recommended," said Mr. Croup, helpfully. "Mister Vandemar might have a little accident with his old toad-sticker. Most accidents do occur in the home. Is that not so, Mister Vandemar?"
"I don't trust statistics," said Mr. Vandemar's blank voice.
Neil Gaiman
#34. Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
Neil Gaiman
#35. If you are to survive, you must believe.
Neil Gaiman
#36. We win some, but we lose many. We lose a lot. We lose our friends and we lose our family. In the end we lose everything. No matter who's with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it's always going to be about life.
Neil Gaiman
#37. Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you're waiting for someone to publish the first thing ...
Neil Gaiman
#39. I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.
Neil Gaiman
#40. She held a bluebell up to the light; and Dunstan could not but observe that the color of sunlight glittering through the purple crystal was inferior in both hue and shade to that of her eyes.
Neil Gaiman
#41. You didn't bring us here,' Lettie said. 'We came because we wanted to. And I came to give you one last chance to go.
Neil Gaiman
#42. You are an immaterial girl living in a material world.
Neil Gaiman
#43. She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.
Neil Gaiman
#44. Magic,' said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, if magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be ...
Neil Gaiman
#45. But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.
Neil Gaiman
#47. they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly. She
Neil Gaiman
#48. I think ... I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.'
'If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,' was all she said.
Neil Gaiman
#49. 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
#50. I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
Neil Gaiman
#52. She didn't have a daddy?" I asked.
"No."
"Did you have a daddy?"
"You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.
Neil Gaiman
#53. I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.
Neil Gaiman
#54. Is this real? Or is it just my imagination?"
"If you tell me what the difference is I might be able to tell you.
Neil Gaiman
#55. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited.
Neil Gaiman
#56. One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.
Neil Gaiman
#57. This is crazy', said Shadow.
Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.
Neil Gaiman
#58. There is an enormous tentacle somewhere in these pages.
Neil Gaiman
#59. Oh, he'll help us whether he wants to or not. I told the truth. I would not kill him. The death-curse of a god is an evil thing.
But I can hurt him. And I will.
And besides ...
Have you never wondered, little bird, what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of a god?
Neil Gaiman
#60. But," expostulated Josiah Worthington. "But. A human child. A living child. I mean. I mean, I mean. This is a graveyard, not a nursery, blast it.
Neil Gaiman
#61. It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.
Neil Gaiman
#62. He isn't eating," whispered Skirnir. "He does not need to," said Frey. "He drinks. He only needs wine, nothing else. Come
Neil Gaiman
#63. There was still the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad.
Neil Gaiman
#64. Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.
Neil Gaiman
#65. It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It's the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.
Neil Gaiman
#66. The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
Neil Gaiman
#68. We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain. Fiction
Neil Gaiman
#69. I wasn't sure what to say. Shall I tell her you're out?
Neil Gaiman
#70. You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring them on. The god of the guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame.
Neil Gaiman
#71. You will learn more from a glorious failure than ever you will from something that you never finished.
Neil Gaiman
#72. Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
Neil Gaiman
#73. Never mind. There. For good or bad. It's done.
Neil Gaiman
#74. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.' There
Neil Gaiman
#75. He tugged on an imaginary rope,somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin.
Would you like some potato salad?
Neil Gaiman
#76. Richard made a break for it. 'Sorry,' he said to the stunned guard, as he yanked his arm out of the man's grip, and fled. 'Wrong London.'
Neil Gaiman
#77. Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.
Neil Gaiman
#78. Everything had been going so well, he'd had it really under his thumb
these few centuries. That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring
Armageddon on you.
Neil Gaiman
#79. 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.
Neil Gaiman
#80. I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.
Neil Gaiman
#81. 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 our legal system
Neil Gaiman
#82. Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena.
Neil Gaiman
#83. Magic is simply a way of talking to the universe in a way that it cannot ignore.
Neil Gaiman
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Neil Gaiman
#87. I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
Neil Gaiman
#88. You don't pass or fail at being a person
Neil Gaiman
#89. Being brave didn't mean you weren't scared. Being brave meant you were scared, really scared, badly scared, and you did the right thing anyway.
Neil Gaiman
#90. The Gods did not count time spent fishing in the hours of a man's life.
Neil Gaiman
#91. Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies.
Neil Gaiman
#92. I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters.
Neil Gaiman
#93. Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.
Neil Gaiman
#94. Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas.
Neil Gaiman
#95. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
Neil Gaiman
#96. I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.
Neil Gaiman
#97. Some of us are so sharp," he [Mr. Vandemar] said as he leaned in closer to Richard, went up on tiptoes into Richard's face, "we could just cut ourselves.
Neil Gaiman
#98. I was going to the library, too. I'd get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me by making me take sandwiches. I was absolutely fine given the prospect of a day spent with books and not eating.
Neil Gaiman
#99. When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
Neil Gaiman
#100. On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.
Neil Gaiman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
