Neil Gaiman Quotes

Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so much trouble

He would not die, for only inferior people died, and he was the inferior of no one. Time

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.

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'I know. But it's the only game in town.' And he went back to the game.

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.

Hunchbacks danced at my wedding for luck. It's a thing you don't see nowadays.

I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there's nothing a puppy can do that I can't do!

There's things, times. When, well, you don't know what to say. You know?

S'why I looove America: City Center's in ruins, there's a fifties creature on the loose, and a man can still get drunk.

So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?'
'Love,' he explained.
She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. 'I hope you choke on it,' she said, flatly.

He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.

Did I hear you say that you had no intention of ever dying?"

"Um. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's a mug's game. I won't have any part of it."

"Then you must tell me what it's like. Let us meet here again, Robert Gadling. In this tavern of the White Horse. In a hundred years.

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.

On the one had, there's you. And on the other hand, there's America. It's bigger than you are. So you try to make sense of it. You try to figure it out, something which it resists. It's big enough and contains enough contradictions that it's perfectly happy not to be figured out. As a writer, all I could do was describe a small part of the whole. And it was too big to see.

We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.

THE LITTLE MAN HURRIED into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. "Because," he announced to the pub in general, "I deserve it.

I don't know what it's like to read this book. I only know what it was like to live the writing of it. I

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.

She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knee his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattooed on his arm and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored the hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.

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

He spun around. She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs.

The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sout with the same tongue.

When people do nice things, you should always say thank you. it makes life an awful lot easier.

That feeling I get when I go looking in my head for a word that isn't there, as if someone must have come and taken it in the night.

Dryware, wetware, hardware, software, blackware, darkware, nightware, nightmare . . . The modem sits inviting beside the phone, red eyes. I let it rest - you can't trust anybody these days.

Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.

Strike me silly,' said Mr Owens, 'if that isn't a baby.'
'Of course it's a baby,' said his wife. And the question is, what is to be done with it?'
'I dare say that is a question, Mistress Owens,' said her husband. 'And yet, it is not our question. For this here baby is unquestionably alive, and as such is nothing to do with us, and is no part of our world.

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber," she explained. "There's a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere - it doesn't all get used up at once."
"I may still be hung over," sighed Richard. "That almost made sense.

Sleep my little babby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken…

[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.

A man who knows that time and the train wait for no man.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

Well," said the third. "Somebody's got to do the honours." "I shall," said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman's. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard.

Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes.
I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me - hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know."
She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands.
Look, it's hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

Maybe there weren't any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.

Hold fast," he called. "Tell me your names, and your stations."
"I am the Lady Door," said Door. "I am Portico's daughter, of the House of the Arch."
"I am Hunter. I am her bodyguard."
"Richard Mayhew," said Richard. "Wet.

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

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

I do not threaten, I merely advise caution.

You're going to pay the bill," said Grahame. "Then I'll escort you and the young lady out to the car. And we'll go back to my place, for a proper talk. Any funny business, and I shoot you both. Capiche? "
Fat Charlie capiched. He also capiched who had been driving the black Mercedes that afternoon and just how close he had already come to death that day. He was beginning to capiche how utterly cracked Grahame Coats was and how little chance Daisy and he had of getting out of this alive.

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.
It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.

We... we could be friends, you know,' said Coraline.
'We could be rare specimens of an exotic breed of African dancing elephants,' said the cat.

Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it.

Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

(Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?).

and she looked both solemn and vulnerable.

He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

Thirty-five years a showgirl that she admits to, and her feet hurt, day in, day out, from the high heels, but she can walk down steps with a forty-pound headdress in high heels, she's walked across a stage with a lion in high heels, she could walk through goddamn Hell in high heels if it came to that.

I cried until I was all cried out.

I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

Coraline? Oh, there you are. Where on earth were you?' 'I was kidnapped by aliens,' said Coraline. 'They came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.' 'Yes,

Most of us find our own voices only after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie;" when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.

Hell is something you carry with you.

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

We have potential. Who needs medals? I'd rather have potential than medals any day.

The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.

We're going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.

If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?

I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale ...

Load of old tosh," said Peter, crossly.

Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.

Fortinbras Bartleby, ten years old when he had died (of consumption, he had told Bod, who had mistakenly believed for several years that Fortinbras had been eaten by lions or bears, and was extremely disappointed to learn it was merely a disease), now apologized to Bod.

The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn't arrive in his head quite when they were meant to.

If a Devil is one who dares, when others hold back, then I am happy to play the Devil in this Mystery, boy.

There are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet.

One day, perhaps, we will have become legends.
We'll pass this way outside of space or time,
When what they'll know of us will be just questions
They'll carve our deeds in stone. Build us in rhyme.

The things they'll tell about us will be lies
But lies of such a kind as tell a truth
Perpetual. Our lives will be revised.
Preserved, we'll mouth the epics of our youth.

Actors will play us, braver than we are,
More funny, deeper, prettier by far.

Their lines will be more resonant and wise
Than anything we said. Majestic lies.

So wait. Such tales might be the truth one day.
For now, alive, we huddle, ache and pray.

I hate to say this, but it is my experience that when a doctor goes to the bad, he is a fouler and darker creature than the worst cut-throat.

I think I've got Fear down, but how do I take it all the way up to Terror?

I'm a troll," he said. Then he paused, and added, more or less as an afterthought, "Fol rol de ol rol.

Time, tide and cocktail hour wait, as it were, for no man.

People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it's all changing. Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing.

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.

Go back? I don't know. I think hell's something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. They're doing the same things they always did. They're doing it to themselves. That's hell.

Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it.

Even the oldest stories are new to somebody ...

As I live, breathe, and defecate!

And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

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.

Vengeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it.

And I think of us, all the people, and the masks we wear, the masks we hide behind and the masks that reveal. I imagine people pretending to be what they truly are, and discovering that other people are so much more and so much less than they imagined themselves to be or present themselves as. And

So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.

He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

She had a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.

Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.

There were bad guys on flying manhole covers after me, and a guy with an armored crotch and a mirrored face.

Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they
are the least of your worries.
Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,
The creaks and footsteps in the night,
their little tricks of hiding things,
or moving them, I find
endearing, not upsettling. It makes the place
feel so much more like a home.
Inhabited.

No, look, there's a blue box. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it's meant to go. And when it turns up, there's a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed 'cause he's awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch 'Blink'.

Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale. - LORD CARLISLE, TO GEORGE SELWYN, 1778

Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they're starting to think their way out of problems
sometimes thinking their way into worse problems.

Dreams shape the world

The Doctor: Sorry, do you have a name?
Idris: Seven hundred years and finally he asks.
The Doctor: But what do I call you?
Idris: I think you call me ... Sexy?
The Doctor: [embarrassed] Only when we're alone.
Idris: We are alone.
The Doctor: Oh. Come on then, Sexy.

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.

It's patterns," he said. "If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama anymore. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

The paths that ghosts follow are written on the land in old words. Ghosts don't take the interstate.