Top 500 Neil Gaiman Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— 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. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”

— Neil Gaiman

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”

— Neil Gaiman

370. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

372. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

374. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

376. “The process of writing can be magical – there times when you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another.”

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

378. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

382. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

385. “I make things up and write them down.”

— 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. “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

388. “I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.”

— Neil Gaiman

389. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

391. “The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.”

— Neil Gaiman

392. “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

393. “And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.”

— Neil Gaiman

394. “Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place.”

— Neil Gaiman

395. “Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.”

— Neil Gaiman

396. “Are there any ponies in this?” asked my sister. “I thought there would be ponies by now.”

— Neil Gaiman

397. “We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall.”

— Neil Gaiman

398. “The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.”

— Neil Gaiman

399. “Dahling, when God put teeth in your mouth, he ruined a perfectly good arsehole.”

— Neil Gaiman

400. “You’re brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don’t care if you are imaginary.”

— Neil Gaiman