Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 9

Always good to remember when you're making art. You don't have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
Neil Gaiman
Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.
Neil Gaiman
The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked…that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
Neil Gaiman
Where does contagion end and art begin?
Neil Gaiman
I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
Neil Gaiman
The dread had not left my soul.
Neil Gaiman
I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
Neil Gaiman
Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside.
Neil Gaiman
We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.
Neil Gaiman
She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.
Neil Gaiman
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.
Neil Gaiman
I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.
Neil Gaiman
Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.
Neil Gaiman
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.
Neil Gaiman
You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Neil Gaiman
I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
...Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there... has the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it's almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese.
Neil Gaiman
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song"..."Curry’s nice too" pointed out Fat Charlie
Neil Gaiman
The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.
Neil Gaiman
He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.
Neil Gaiman
This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.
Neil Gaiman
Well?" said Loki. "What about you, Heimdall? Do you have any suggestions?""I do," said Heimdall. "But you won't like it."Thor banged his fist down upon the table. "It does not matter whether or not we like it," he said. "We are gods! There is nothing that any of us gathered here would not do to get back Mjollnir, the hammer of the gods. Tell us your idea, and if it is a good idea, we will like it.""You won't like it," said Heimdall."We will like it!" said Thor."Well," said Heimdall, "I think we should dress Thor as a bride. Have him put on the necklace of the Brisings. Have him wear a bridal crown. Stuff his dress so he looks like a woman. Veil his face. We'll have him wear keys that jingle, as women do, drape him with jewels -""I don't like it!" said Thor. "People will think... well, for a start they'll think I dress up in women's clothes. Absolutely out of the question. I don't like it. I am definitely not going to be wearing a bridal veil. None of us like this idea, do we? Terrible, terrible idea. I've got a beard. I can't shave off my beard.""Shut up, Thor," said Loki son of Laufey. "It's an excellent idea.
Neil Gaiman
Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world. Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.
Neil Gaiman
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept.
Neil Gaiman
We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Neil Gaiman
It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head
Neil Gaiman
The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.
Neil Gaiman
I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.
Neil Gaiman
You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.
Neil Gaiman
Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.
Neil Gaiman
I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.
Neil Gaiman
Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.
Neil Gaiman
All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.
Neil Gaiman
We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Neil Gaiman
It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.
Neil Gaiman
People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.
Neil Gaiman
Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.
Neil Gaiman
If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.
Neil Gaiman
Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.
Neil Gaiman
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared.
Neil Gaiman
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Neil Gaiman
The best thing—in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.
Neil Gaiman
Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
Neil Gaiman
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.
Neil Gaiman
The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your i
Neil Gaiman
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.
Neil Gaiman
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.
Neil Gaiman
They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.
Neil Gaiman
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
Neil Gaiman
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.
Neil Gaiman
Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.
Neil Gaiman