Neil Gaiman
To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.Collection: Eye
You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.Collection: Hurt
They could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive.Collection: Looks
You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door.Collection: Doors
Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.Collection: Mother
Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.Collection: Tin
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.Collection: Long
Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?Collection: Boys
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.Collection: Life
As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.Collection: Long
There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.Collection: Football
Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.Collection: Art
A flash of resentment. It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having...if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn't fair. "Life's not fair," said Ginnie, as if I had spoken aloud.Collection: Trying
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.Collection: Cutting
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?Collection: Children
Oh, monsters are scared. That's why they're monsters.Collection: Monsters
I knew enough about adults to know that if did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway.Collection: Believe
We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.Collection: Choices
The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.Collection: Song
Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.Collection: Life Is
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.Collection: Morning
Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes.Collection: Knowing Everything
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.Collection: People
Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.Collection: Writing
Dahling, when God put teeth in your mouth, he ruined a perfectly good arsehole.Collection: Perfectly Good
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.Collection: Dark
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So 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.Collection: Writing
Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?Collection: Advice
People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.Collection: People
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.Collection: Cities
And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.Collection: Watches
You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.Collection: Failing
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.Collection: New Year
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.Collection: Real
I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.Collection: Writing
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.Collection: One Word
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.Collection: Past
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.Collection: People
I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled.Collection: Hurt
Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.Collection: Talking
It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.Collection: Matter
I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.Collection: Alive
I just want you to know,' said the girl, coldly, 'that whoever you are and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.' And then she added, with feeling, 'Idiot.Collection: Girl
When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.Collection: Mean
Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.Collection: Writing
If not for Death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning — a boundary beyond which the living cannot cross.Collection: Boundaries
It seemed to Coraline that it was crouching, and staring down at her, as if it were not really a house but only the idea of a house—and the person who had had the idea, she was certain, was not a good person.Collection: Ideas
Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar. “What number am I thinking of?” “I beg your pardon?” “What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.Collection: Thinking
How old are you?" asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he would never have dared. "As old as my tongue," said Hunter, primly, "and a little older than my teeth.Collection: Doors