Top 500 Neil Gaiman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

2. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Mistake Quotes, Graduation Quotes

5. “You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”

— Neil Gaiman

6. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you're doing something.”

— Neil Gaiman

7. “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”

— Neil Gaiman

8. “The one thing that 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.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Dance Quotes

9. “That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.”

— Neil Gaiman

10. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”

— Neil Gaiman

11. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

12. “A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Book Quotes

13. “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.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

14. “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

15. “If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”

— Neil Gaiman

16. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

— Neil Gaiman

17. “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

— Neil Gaiman

18. “Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.”

— Neil Gaiman

19. “Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”

— Neil Gaiman

20. “There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”

— Neil Gaiman

21. “I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you’ve done something.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Mistake Quotes

22. “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

24. “Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.”

— Neil Gaiman

25. “You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.”

— Neil Gaiman

26. “Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

28. “You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Design Quotes

29. “She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Beautiful Quotes, Quotes About Fire

30. “Libraries really are the gates to the future.”

— Neil Gaiman

31. “Libraries are our friends.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Thought Provoking Quotes

32. “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”

— Neil Gaiman

33. “What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”

— Neil Gaiman

34. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.”

— Neil Gaiman

35. “One word after another. That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Night

36. “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”

— Neil Gaiman

37. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

— Neil Gaiman

38. “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Memories, Quotes About Childhood

39. “And so there is magic.”

— Neil Gaiman

40. “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human.”

— Neil Gaiman

41. “I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.”

— Neil Gaiman

42. “Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

43. “My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet.”

— Neil Gaiman

44. “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.”

— Neil Gaiman

45. “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

46. “If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.”

— Neil Gaiman

47. “Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Perfection Quotes

48. “What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.”

— Neil Gaiman

49. “Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Quotes About Growing Up

50. “Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.”

— Neil Gaiman

Featured in: Book Quotes