“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
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”
“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you're doing something.”
“That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.”
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
“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.”
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”
“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
“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!”
“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.”
“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
“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.”
“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
“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.”
“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.”
“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.”
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”
“You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.”
“What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”
“Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.”
“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.”
“Libraries really are the gates to the future.”
“You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”
“Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.”
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
“Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”
“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.”
“Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.”
“And so there is magic.”
“Libraries are our friends.”
“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.”
“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human.”
“If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.”
“I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.”
“Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”
“My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet.”
“Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.”
“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.”
“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.”
“Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.”
“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.”
“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”
“You hurt. It’s okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
“You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
“I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.”
“The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.”
“I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.”
“It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?”
“The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.”
“You musn’t be afraid of the dark.’ ‘I’m not,’ said Shadow. ‘I’m afraid of the people in the dark.”
“Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.”
“You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”
“Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.”
“Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.”
“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.”
“Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.”
“You were her way here, and it’s a dangerous thing to be a door.”
“Stories are the things that allow us to persuade each other that we’re human.”
“A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.”
“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”
“Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.”
“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”
“Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.”
“You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.”
“I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.”
“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
“Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”
“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.”
“Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.”
“Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes...”
“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.”
“Anyone who calls you “little lady” has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”
“I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.”
“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.”
“You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart.”
“Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
“You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.”
“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”
“Biting’s excellent. It’s like kissing – only there is a winner.”
“He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.”
“The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.”
“He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.”
“If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”
“Death is the second oldest of the Endless. It’s hard not to love her. She loves you, after all.”
“I don’t know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I’ve eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than ‘Pass the salt’ or ‘If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?’”
“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.”
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