Neil Gaiman

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”

“I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses.”

“Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.”

“There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. ”

“If you saw two groups of children arguing over which of them could play in some waste ground, would you chose sides?”

“The next morning he boarded the train for the six-hour journey south that would bring him to the strange gothic spires and arches of St. Pancras Station. His mother gave him a small walnut cake that she had made for the journey and a thermos filled with tea; and Richard Mayhew went to London feeling like hell.”

“The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.”

“This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.”

“I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge.Oh yes, I can hear you.But I'm not coming out.”

“I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.”

“You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”

“Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.”

“There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries.The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.”

“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”

“It's just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe...But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind, and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.”

“Hemos sido inevitablemente retenidos por el mundo. Cuenta con volver a vernos cuando nos veas.”

“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”

“I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.”

“What’s your name, lad?”“Newton. Newton Pulsifer.”“LUCIFER? What’s that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters?”“That’s Pulsifer,” explained Newton. “With a P. I don’t know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey.”The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.”

“There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.”

“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.”

“Black as night, sweet as sin.”

“A voice from the creature, smooth as buttered oil. "He-llo," is said. "Ding-dong. You look remarkably like dinner."I'm Charlie Nancy," said Charlie Nancy. "Who are you?"I am Dragon," said the dragon. "And I shall devour you in one slow mouthful, little man in a hat."Charlie blinked. What would my father do? He wondered. What would Spider have done?...Er. You’re bored with talking to me now, and you’re going to let me pass unhindered,” he told the dragon, with as much conviction as he was able to muster.Gosh. Good try. But I’m afraid I’m not,” said the dragon, enthusiastically.Actually, I’m going to eat you.”You aren’t scared of limes, are you?” asked Charlie, before remembering that he’d given the lime to Daisy.The creature laughed, scornfully. “I,” it said, “am frightened of nothing.”Nothing?”Nothing,” it said.Charlie said “Are you extremely frightened of nothing?”Absolutely terrified of it,” admitted the Dragon.You know,” said Charlie, “Have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?”No,” said the dragon, uncomfortably, “I most definitely would not.”There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. “That,” he said, “was much too easy.”

“The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more. And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it.”

“Death's a capricious thing, innit?""Yes. Yes, she is.”

“Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?”

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, 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), but still unique.”

“It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.”

“Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...”

“I was kidnapped by aliens, 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.”

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.”

“Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.”

“Even the proudest spirit can be broken with love.”

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands."(As quoted on BookRiot, June 18, 2013)”

“On the whole, stories don't write themselves.”

“In reality the world is made of thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.”

“I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.”

“Why does she want me?" Coraline asked the cat. "Why does she want me to stay here with her?""She wants something to love, I think," said the cat. "Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with creatures like that.”

“The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”

“It won't hurt, said her other father. Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head.”

“The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. "There are those," it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, "who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one - after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?”

“Here you go, she said. I don't need it anymore. I'm very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, saved some other people's death.”

“Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do.”

“I had to persuade a dog to swallow a pill. I twittered for advice and I got suggestion after suggestion. Most of them didn't work. 'Put the pill in the sausage.' No - that doesn't work. 'Cheese.' No.Then someone said: 'You wrap it in butter and it will slide down.'I tried it and it worked!And I'd learnt how to give a pill to a dog through the magic of Twitter.”

“Here, far from our homes, we will be forgotten by our gods.”

“This little piggy went to HadesThis little piggy stayed homeThis little piggy ate raw and steaming human fleshThis little piggy violated virginsAnd this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top”

“I am frightened of nothing.""Nothing?""Nothing.""Are you extremely frightened of nothing?""Absolutely terrified of it.""I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?""No, I most definitely would not.”

“We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.”

“If you can't eat it, drink it, smoke it, or snort it... then f*ck it!”

“The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn’t want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”