Neil Gaiman

“He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness."You know," he concluded, after a while, "I think he actually looks like an Adam.”

“For some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless tree and dance on nothing until dancing was done.”

“Still. Four words.And I didn’t realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:Dear Neil,If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children’s area, what would it be?Thanks!LynnI pondered a bit. I’d said a lot about books and kids’ reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote: I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned: “… and then w”

“I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.”

“I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.”

“You're sick. Sick and evil and weird.”

“There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one...”

“Spiders' webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.”

“If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.”

“Now,” she told them, “now is the time to be afraid of the dark.” Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete.”

“The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.It's RUBBISH, death. It's STUPID. I don't want nothing to do with it.”

“Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

“How old are you?" asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he would never have dared."As old as my tongue," said Hunter, primly, "and a little older than my teeth.”

“I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes, I want you with me.”

“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.”

“So," he asked. "How's death?""Hard," she said. "It just keeps going.”

“Even in dreams and in death, a monk and a fox are from different worlds, as they were in life, and in different worlds they will forever stay”

“I serve the king of dreams and I do his bidding. But you are correct once I was a poet and like all poets I spent too long in the kingdom of dreams.”

“One who transmuted things from formlessness and shapelessness into that-which-was-not-real, but without which the real would have no meaning”

“It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.”

“The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.”

“Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar.“What number am I thinking of?” “I beg your pardon?” “What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.”

“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.”

“All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.”

“She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.”

“Posso acreditar em coisas que são verdade e posso acreditar em coisas que não são verdade. E posso acreditar em coisas que ninguém sabe se são verdade ou não. Posso acreditar no Papai Noel, no coelhinho da Páscoa, na Marilyn Monroe, nos Beatles, no Elvis e no Mister Ed. Ouça bem... Eu acredito que as pessoas evoluem, que o saber é infinito, que o mundo é comandado por cartéis secretos de banqueiros e que é visitado por alienígenas regularmente -uns legais, que se parecem com lêmures enrugados, e uns maldosos, que mutilam gado e querem nossa água e nossas mulheres. Acredito que o futuro é um saco e que é demais, e acredito que um dia a Mulher Búfalo Branco vai ficar preta e chutar o traseiro de todo mundo. Também acho que todos homens não passam de meninos crescidos com profundos problemas de comunicação e que o declínio da qualidade do sexo nos Estados Unidos coincide com o declínio dos cinemas drive-in de um Estado ao outro. Acredito que todos os políticos são canalhas sem princípios, mas ainda assim melhores do que as outras alternativas. Acho que a Califórnia vai afundar no mar quando o grande terremoto vier, ao mesmo tempo em que a Flórida vai se dissolver em loucura, em jacarés, em lixo tóxico. Acredito que sabonetes antibactericidas estão destruindo nossa resistência à sujeira e às doenças, de modo que algum dia todos seremos dizimados por uma gripe comum, como aconteceu com os marcianos em Guerra dos Mundos. Acredito que os melhores poetas do século passado foram Edith Sitwell e Don Marquis, que o jade é esperma de dragão seco, e que há milhares de anos em uma vida passada eu era uma xamã siberiana de um braço só. Acho que o destino da humanidade está escrito nas estrelas, que o gosto dos doces era mesmo melhor quando eu era criança, que aerodinamicamente é impossível pra uma abelha grande voar, que a luz é uma onda e uma partícula, que tem um gato em uma caixa em algum lugar que está vivo e que está morto ao mesmo tempo (apesar de que, se não abrirem a caixa algum dia e alimentarem o bicho, ele no fim vai ficar só morto de dois jeitos), e que existem estrelas no universo bilhões de anos mais velhas do que o próprio universo. Acredito em um deus pessoal que cuida de mim e se preocupa comigo e que supervisiona tudo que eu faço, em uma deusa impessoal que botou o universo em movimento e saiu fora pra ficar com as amigas dela e nem sabe que estou viva. Eu acredito em um universo vazio e sem deus, um universo com caos causal, um passado tumultuado e pura sorte cega. Acredito que qualquer pessoa que diz que o sexo é supervalorizado nunca fez direito, que qualquer um que diz saber o que está acontecendo pode mentir a respeito de coisas pequenas. Acredito na honestidade absoluta e em mentiras sociais sensatas. Acredito no direito das mulheres à escolha, no direito dos bebês de viver, que, ao mesmo tempo em que toda vida humana é sagrada, não tem nada de errado com a pena de morte se for possível confiar no sistema legal sem restrições, e que ninguém, a não ser um imbecil, confiaria no sistema legal. Acredito que a vida é um jogo, uma piada cruel e que a vida é o que acontece quando se está vivo e o melhor é relaxar e aproveitar.”

“You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”

“It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods,”

“I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.”

“Soon,” said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, “they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.”

“You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.”

“Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked. “Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel. “It’s not always fatal.”

“For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.”

“He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.”

“The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!”

“People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.”

“You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world.”

“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.”

“Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.”

“Sempre quis saber o que aconteceu com as crianças depois que voaram para longe...Eram apenas gente de mentira, não de verdade.Mas não significa que não tenham histórias.”

“We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.”

“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 that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.”

“It seemed to Coraline that it was crouching, and staring down at her, as if it were not really a house but only the idea of a house—and the person who had had the idea, she was certain, was not a good person.”

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

“Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.”

“If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning — a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross.”

“It doth not hurt", whispered a faint voice, "She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.”

“You eternals have long lives, but short memories. The changing people have short lives, but we do not forget.”

“She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.”

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”