Top 500 Neil Gaiman Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give.”

— Neil Gaiman

352. “Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.”

— Neil Gaiman

353. “A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.”

— Neil Gaiman

354. “You don’t get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman.”

— Neil Gaiman

355. “And all the time we spent in this place would fade and vanish, like a dawn dream on waking that colours the day but cannot be touched or remembered.”

— Neil Gaiman

356. “Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.”

— Neil Gaiman

357. “From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.”

— Neil Gaiman

358. “The Sky was red, but not warm red of a sunset. This was an angry, glowering red, the colour of an infected wound.”

— Neil Gaiman

359. “You shouldn’t trust the storyteller; only trust the story.”

— Neil Gaiman

360. “God who knows all things, I have no prayer book and I do not know any prayers by heart. But you know all the prayers. You are God. So this is what I am going to do. I am going to say the alphabet, and I will let you put the words together.”

— Neil Gaiman

361. “You can’t make me love you.”

— Neil Gaiman

362. “We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.”

— Neil Gaiman

363. “They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.”

— Neil Gaiman

364. “I am the mother of Odin’s stallion, Sleipnir. I am the father of Fenrir Sun-Eater, and of Hel Half-Rotted and of Jormungund the World-Serpent. I am Loki Scar-Lip, Loki Skywalker, Loki Giant’s Child, Loki Lie-Smith. I am Loki, who is fire and wit and hate. I am Loki. And I will be under an obligation to no one.”

— Neil Gaiman

365. “Without our stories we are incomplete.”

— Neil Gaiman

366. “One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.”

— Neil Gaiman

367. “There was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway.”

— Neil Gaiman

368. “To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.”

— Neil Gaiman

369. “For the record, I don’t expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I’m a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.”

— Neil Gaiman

370. “In the pale light of the Moon I play the game of you. Whoever I am. Whoever you are. All sense of where I am, of who I am and where I’m going, has been swallowed by the dark. And I walk through the stars and sky... a trinity of dreams beneath the moon.”

— Neil Gaiman

371. “Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.”

— Neil Gaiman

372. “Some skills can be attained by education, and some by practice, and some by time. Those skills will come if you study. Soon enough you will master Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. But some skills cannot be mastered by the living, and for those you must wait a little longer.”

— Neil Gaiman

373. “I’m willing to make a fool out of myself in public. I’m also willing to make those mistakes that you’re going to make the first time you go out, so hopefully the next time it will be better.”

— Neil Gaiman

374. “I know that this is the internet, and we’re all anonymous and all that, but really. It doesn’t hurt to try to be nice.”

— Neil Gaiman

375. “Look... it’s not that easy. Let me tell you what you get. You get life, and breath, a world to walk and a path through the world – and the free will to wander the world as you choose.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

377. “It’s not what I’d want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.”

— Neil Gaiman

378. “Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”

— Neil Gaiman

379. “We all have stories. Or perhaps it’s because, as humans, we are already an assemblage of stories and the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes. But we don’t see – we can’t see the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories, we realize the things we see as dividing us are all too often illusions; falsehoods. That the walls between us are, in truth, no thicker than scenery.”

— Neil Gaiman

380. “I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.”

— Neil Gaiman

381. “Humanity is evil – civilization is the scum that forms on the surface, but beneath, humanity consists of brutes and animals.”

— Neil Gaiman

382. “If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.”

— Neil Gaiman

383. “Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.”

— Neil Gaiman

384. “If Hell is other people, thought Shadow, then Purgatory is airports.”

— Neil Gaiman

385. “I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I’d get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I’d love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn’t taste of anything else.”

— Neil Gaiman

386. “He was a creature of hope. For dreams are hopes, and echoes of hopes. And I am a creature of despair.”

— Neil Gaiman

387. “I have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do.”

— Neil Gaiman

388. “Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.”

— Neil Gaiman

389. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

— Neil Gaiman

390. “Coraline took a deep breath and stepped into the darkness, where strange voices whispered and distant winds howled. She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest. She closed her eyes against the dark. Eventually.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

392. “Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.”

— Neil Gaiman

393. “Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.”

— Neil Gaiman

394. “Some of the things are the same no matter which world you’re in, kid. One of ’em is this: The quickest way out of something is usually straight through it.”

— Neil Gaiman

395. “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

396. “When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf ’cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.”

— Neil Gaiman

397. “Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”

— Neil Gaiman

398. “We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.”

— Neil Gaiman

399. “Real life doesn’t have to be convincing, but fiction does.”

— Neil Gaiman

400. “I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I’m doing an architectural diagram of something.”

— Neil Gaiman