Neil Gaiman

“Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.”

“Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.”

“When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.”

“Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.”

“Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.”

“There was no moon but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too and lights on buildings and on bridges which looked like earthbound stars and they glimmered repeated as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It’s fairyland thought Richard.”

“Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.”

“Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.”

“The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.”

“There are places that we are welcomed," said Triolet, "and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?”

“When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.”

“He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.”

“You shine like a beacon in a dark world.”

“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.”

“I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.”

“Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.)”

“Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you'd answer for your evil deeds and your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we'd feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls""He must have eaten a lot of people.""Not as many as you'd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had better be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby...”

“Dreams shape the world”

“It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.”

“The only water in the forest is the River.”

“The quickest way is sometimes the longest.”

“And that life is what happens when you’re alive, and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

“I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.”

“It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.”

“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.”

“Wy, ludzie, mówicie o życiu i śmierci, jakby to były dwie rzeczy wzajemnie się wykluczające, jakby nie istniała rzeka, będąca również drogą, czy pieśń, będąca kolorem.Bo nie istnieją - odparł Cień. - Prawda? Echa znad wody powtarzały szeptem jego słowa.Musisz pamiętać - rzekł cierpko pan Ibis że życie i śmierć to dwie strony tej samej monety, jak orzeł i reszka na ćwierćdolarówce.A gdybym miał ćwierćdolarówkę o dwóch orłach?Ale nie masz. Miewają je tylko głupcy i bogowie.”

“Zastanawiałeś się nad tym, co oznacza bycie bogiem? - spytał. Miał brodę i czapeczkę baseballową. - To oznacza odrzucenie egzystencji materialnej i przemianę w mem: coś, co trwa wiecznie w umysłach ludzi, jak dziecięca piosenka. Znaczy to, że każdy odtwarza cię sam w swoim umyśle. Praktycznie nie masz już tożsamości. Stajesz się tysiącem aspektów tego, czego pragną od ciebie ludzie. A każdy pragnie czegoś zupełnie innego. Nic nie jest stałe, nic nie jest niezmienne.”

“Gee-word?""Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?""Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.”

“He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass”

“And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.”

“The cafe door opened. A young man in dusty white leathers entered, and the wind blew in empty crisp packets and newspapers and ice cream wrappers in with him. They danced around his feet like excited children, then fell exhausted to the floor.”

“Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.”

“The moonlight was enough. It would do.”

“The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself,”

“And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.”

“I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.”

“Brakuje mi słowa. Chodzi o odwrotność świętości.- Profanum? - odparł Cień.- Nie. Chodzi mi o miejsca mniej święte niż każde inne. O ujemnej świętości. Miejsca, w których nie da się postawić żadnej świątyni, których ludzie unikają, a jeśli już je odwiedzą, znikają jak najszybciej mogą. Jedynie bogowie mogą stąpać po tych miejscach, jeśli oczywiście ktoś ich do tego zmusi.- Nie wiem - rzekł Cień. - Nie sądzę, by istniało takie słowo.- Cała Ameryka jest trochę taka - wyjaśnił Czernobog. - To dlatego nie jesteśmy tu mile widziani. Ale środek... on jest najgorszy. Zupełnie jak pole minowe. Wszyscy stąpamy tam zbyt ostrożnie, by odważyć się naruszyć rozejm.”

“Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It's because spiders think this is funny, and they don't want you ever to forget them.”

“Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.”

“If I come back, it will be a place, but it won't be a home any longer.”

“He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.”

“Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?''Different woman,' said Mr. Nancy. 'Same Deal.”

“Ali između sadašnjice i konačnog kraja prostire se Život. Nit mu je krenuo ususret, širom otvorivši ne samo oči nego i srce.”

“Nite, ti si živ. To znači da je tvoj potencijal bezgraničan. Možeš učiniti, stvoriti, sanjati što god poželiš. Ako ti promijeniš svijet, on će se doista promijeniti. To je potencijal. Čim umreš, potencijal nestaje. Gotovo je. Što si napravio, napravio si, svoj san si odsanjao, svoje ime ispisao. Možda te sahrane ovdje, možda čak postaneš jedan od onih koji hodaju i poslije smrti. Ali potencijala više neće biti.”

“It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.”

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.”

“I think if you decide that any book is about Only One Thing you're probably wrong. Even if that thing is in there.”

“Someone killed my Mother and my Father and my Sister?""Yes, someone did.""A Man?""A Man.""Which means," said Bod, "you're asking the wrong question."Silas raised an eyebrow. "How so?""Well," said Bod. "If I go outside in the world, the question isn't who will keep me safe from him?""No?""No. It's who will keep him safe from me?”

“Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.”