Neil Gaiman

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) 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.”

“Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you'll see the worldIf I'm not mistaken...Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.”

“People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.”

“Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's.”

“Quindi il giorno divenne un giorno d'attesa, cosa che era, lo sapeva bene, un peccato: i momenti devono essere sperimentati, aspettare è un peccato contro il tempo che deve ancora venire e contro gli istanti presenti che vengono trascurati. Tuttavia, aspettava.”

“A god's relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.”

“Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted.”

“If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say, 'I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love.' She is whispering that, and she whispers, 'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.”

“Cieli, pensò Old Bailey con una sorta di compiacimento. Mai due di essi uguali.”

“I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' '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.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said.”

“I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispencing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don't like.”

“What about volcanoes?""What about them?""All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.”

“You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer & the finest friend”

“Diana used to tell me she had a travel jinx, something I only really started to believe when the plane door fell off.”

“I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.”

“Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.”

“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”

“America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.”

“Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.”

“Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does ... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.”

“The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.”

“You should know that if we do fucking kill you, the we'll just delete you. You got that? One click and then you're overwriten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.”

“Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.”

“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.”

“I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”

“Znacznie łatwiej jest nie wierzyć w coś, kiedy to coś nie patrzy na ciebie i nie wypowiada twojego imienia.”

“There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.”

“I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in betweens.”

“You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

“The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.”

“But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)”

“One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.”

“Non era stato coraggioso, restando lì fermo a farsi pungere - disse Coraline al gatto. - Non era stato coraggioso perché non aveva avuto paura: quella era l'unica cosa che potesse fare. Ma quando era tornato a riprendersi gli occhiali, sapendo che lì c'erano le vespe, aveva avuto veramente paura. Quello era stato vero coraggio. - Mosse il primo passo lungo il corridoio. Sentiva odore di chiuso, di polvere e di umidità. Il gatto avanzata lentamente accanto a lei. - E perché mai? - le domandò il gatto, con un tono che rivelava scarso interesse. - Perché - disse Coraline - quando hai paura di qualcosa, ma la fai comunque, quello è coraggio.”

“If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT!'? ... I mean, why do that if you really don't want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it's all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you've built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.”

“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”

“He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.”

“Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by thecomputer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the departmentthat drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attachedjust saying: "Learn, guys.”

“It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.”

“What do stars do? They shine.”

“The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.”

“Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.”

“He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.”

“He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.”

“I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.”

“You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.”

“As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.”

“I am an academic," said Professor Mandalay, "and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.”

“There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.”

“Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.”

“Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.”