Neil Gaiman
For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.
Oh, tweeting prolifically is the most easy thing in the world. Tweeting prolifically is like somebody saying, 'Boy, you're a really good walker around,' you know. It's not really hard.
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.
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.
I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
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.
Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.
I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.
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.
The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked... that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.
Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.
'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
Make good art.
I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.
You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.
When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn't do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn't do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared.
When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.
And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.
When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.
I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.
Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.
My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.
I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.
Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.
Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?
In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.
We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I've written.
A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.