Neil Gaiman

“Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries.”

“The face of a man who had sipped life's vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.”

“I would have given my life for you," she whispered, sadly."Live," said the monk."You shall be revenged," said the fox. "The onmyoji who did this to you will learn what it means to take something from a fox.”

“You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose. But you've got to learn to throw things away eventually.”

“In this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.”

“Da piccolo leggi di pirati e cowboy e astronauti, e una volta che pensi che il mondo sia pieno di cose meravigliose, ti dicono che invece è fatto di balene morte e di foreste abbattute e di scorie nucleari che infettano la Terra per milioni di anni. Se proprio vuoi saperlo, secondo me così non vale la pena di diventare grandi.”

“Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.”

“I hope, that in the days, and weeks, and years to come, the question of where the dividing lines between adult and children’s fiction really are, and why they blur so, and whether we truly need them—and who, ultimately, books are for—will rise up in your mind when you least expect it to, and vex you, as you also are unable, in an entirely satisfactory manner, to answer it.”

“To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love.”

“Hope when you've got nothing else, he once told us. But if you´ve got anything else, then for Heaven's sake, Do it!”

“But she knew also that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristan by arguing with his mother.”

“I love the word 'fantasy'... but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read.”

“Will eventually grow up and get a real job. Until then, will keep making things up and writing them down.”

“I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love - drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.”

“He heard long ago, in a dream, that one day in every century Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality: that this is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after.”

“Go get your heart broken.”

“We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was.”

“And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means "that thing over there." ("Quick, brave Himalayan Guide - what's that thing over there?""Yeti.""I see.")”

“Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.”

“I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.”

“Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism."[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]”

“I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. 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 the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“I'm fine,' lied Richard bravely, to no one in particular.”

“It doesn't happen like this! Everybody, you put him in a death trap, he pulls something outta his utility belt and he's away. Same bat time, same bat channel.”

“This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair.”

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

“¿Ha estado alguna vez enamorado? Horrible, ¿no? Te hace tan vulnerable. Te abre el pecho y el corazón y eso significa que alguien puede meterse dentro de ti y revolver todo. Construyes todas estas defensas, todo fuerte y armadura, para que nada pueda hacerte daño y entonces, llega esta estúpida persona, no diferente de cualquier otra estúpida persona, y se mete en tu estúpida vida… Le das un pedazo de ti, que no te pidió. Hace algo tonto algún día, como besarte o sonreírte y es entonces cuando tu vida ya no te pertenece nunca más. El amor toma rehenes. Llega hasta lo más profundo dentro de ti. Te va carcomiendo y te deja llorando en la oscuridad; una frase tan simple como “quizá deberíamos ser sólo amigos” se convierte en una astilla de vidrio que se te va hundiendo en el corazón. Duele. No sólo en la imaginación. No sólo en la mente. Es un alma herida, un verdadero dolor que se te mete dentro y te rasga en pedazos. Odio el amor.”

“Wherever you go, you take yourself wih you.”

“I'm alive,' said Shadow. 'I'm not dead. Remember?''You're not dead,' Laura said. 'But I'm not sure you're alive, either. Not really.”

“It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

“I am as my creator made me.”

“You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time your persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.Whenever it rains, you will think of her.”

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”

“Vecchio ma soddisfatto, aveva l'aria di un uomo che ha bevuto fino in fondo il calice dell'esistenza e nel complesso lo ha trovato colmo di whiskey, di quello buono.”

“To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but would fail to give the full picture; it would be like describing the planet Jupiter as bigger than a duck. Richard hated clifftops, and high buildings; somewhere not far inside of him was the fear – the start, utter, silently screaming terror – that if he got too close to the edge, then something would take over, and he would find himself walking to the edge of a clifftop and then he would just step off into space. It was as if he could not entirely trust himsels, and that scared Richard more than the simple fear of falling ever could. So he called it vertigo, and hated it and himself, and kept away from high places.”

“Now, where do I bring this thing down?" I asked. There was a hesitation, then, "You don't. We didn't design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources." "So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?”

“Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...”

“You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.”

“So yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”

“Mistress Ownens rubbed her eyes with a knuckle, then dabbed at them with her apron, and she shook her head. "Do you know what you're going to do now?" she asked."See the world," said Bod. "Get into trouble. Get out of trouble again. visit jungle and volcanoes and deserts and islands. And people. I want to meet an awful lot of people.”

“If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?”

“I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.”

“As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn't there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all.”

“It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect;”

“I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.”

“In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.”

“you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.”

“People tend to find books when they are ready for them.”

“His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.”

“I think...that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.”