Neil Gaiman

“He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family.”

“That's the joy of a harlequinade, after all, isn't it? We change our costumes. We change our roles.”

“She had the feeling that the door was looking at her, which she knew was silly, and knew on a deeper level was somehow true.”

“If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.”

“Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.”

“There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.”

“You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.”

“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?”

“Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.”

“In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. There was something that someone said at my first Milford, about using style as a covering, but sooner or later you would have to walk naked down the street, that was useful...And then I remembered. It was Harlan Ellison about a decade ago.He said, "Hey. Gaiman. What's with the stubble? Every time I see you, you're stubbly. What is it? Some kind of English fashion statement?""Not really.""Well? Don't they have razors in England for Chrissakes?""If you must know, I don't like shaving because I have a really tough beard and sensitive skin. So by the time I've finished shaving I've usually scraped my face a bit. So I do it as little as possible.""Oh." He paused. "I've got that too. What you do is, you rub your stubble with hair conditioner. Leave it a couple of minutes, then wash it off. Then shave normally. Makes it really easy to shave. No scraping."I tried it. It works like a charm. Best advice from a writer I've ever received.”

“Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.”

“Oh- my twitchy witchy girlI think you are so nice,I give you bowls of porridgeAnd I give you bowls of iceCream.I give you lots of kisses,And I give lots of hugs,But I never give you sandwichesWith bugsIn.”

“So, you figure they won't notice you're back?" sneered the marquis. "Just, 'oh look, there's another angel, here, grab a harp and on with the hosannas'?”

“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.”

“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “MaybeAnansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa inthe dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg,pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy storyabout a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respondto the stories. They tell them themselves. The storiesspread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.Because now the folk who never had any thought in their headbut how to run from lions and keep far enough away from riversthat the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting todream about a whole new place to live. The world may be thesame, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have thesame story, the one where they get born and they do stuff andthey die, but now the story means something different to what itmeant before.”

“You aren't scared of limes, are you?" asked Charlie.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, "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?""No," said the Dragon uncomfortably, "I most definitely would not.”

“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.”

“And then, in a skittering, chittering rush, it came. The hand, running high on its fingertips, scrabbled through the tall grass and up onto a tree stump. It stood there for a moment, like crab tasting the air, and then it made one triumphant, nail-clacking leap onto the center of the tablecloth.Time slowed for Coraline. The white fingers closed around the black key....”

“There," she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see."You're wrong! You don't know where your parents are, do you?" she turned and looked at Coraline. "Now," she said, "you're going to stay here for ever and always.”

“Words can wound, and wounds can heal.”

“The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?”

“You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

“It's like people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

“Ride the silver fish; you will not drown”

“Amy: This time can we... lose the bunk beds? The Doctor: No Bunk beds are cool, a bed with a ladder, you can't beat that!”

“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.”

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

“It is only a gesture," he said, turning back to Shadow. "But gestures mean everything. The death of one dog symbolizes the death of all dogs.”

“It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés. And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day.”

“It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never looked at it, not looked at it.”

“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.”

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”

“All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.”

“The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.”

“All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”

“There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.”

“There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.”

“I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight.”

“When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?”

“Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.”

“Sexton: I think the whole world's gone mad.Death: Uh-uh. It's always like this. You probably just don't get out enough.”

“You know that I love you."And despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew knew that the other mother loved her as a possession, nothing more, a tolerated pet whose behavior was no longer amusing.”

“All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.”

“I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.”

“Incluso llegué a pensar que, si estallaba una guerra nuclear, no quedarían más que unas cuantas cucarachas radiactivas y tu madre.”

“Cómo tomas el café?Negro como la noche y dulce como un pecado.”

“I am following my fishie. La la laaaa. Because my fish knows where to go. My fish is the Borghal Rantipole who I made look like a fishie because I am so clever and I can do things like that if I want... La la la... It knows many thingummies. The Borghal Rantipole that is. And now it is inconspicuous too as well.”

“Crowley was currently doing 110 mph somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns no wings. Admittedly he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums”

“I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.”

“Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.”