Top 500 Neil Gaiman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

354. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

361. “Without our stories we are incomplete.”

— Neil Gaiman

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

378. “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

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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

384. “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

385. “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

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

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

— Neil Gaiman

389. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

394. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

396. “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

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

— Neil Gaiman

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

— Neil Gaiman

399. “If you can’t be happy where you are, you can’t be happy anywhere.”

— Neil Gaiman

400. “It’s not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers – we’re much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.”

— Neil Gaiman