Neil Gaiman
Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside.Collection: Looks
I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe."Collection: Cutting
The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are...so make up your own rules.Collection: Graduation
Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.Collection: Sleep
Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.Collection: Choices
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.Collection: Children
It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt.Collection: Mistake
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.Collection: Children
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.Collection: Kings
It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud.Collection: Lying
Then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.Collection: Love
When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.Collection: Writing
If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.Collection: Men
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.Collection: Communication
I noticed a long time ago that the Universe rewards belief systems. It doesn't really matter what you believe - it'll be there and waiting for you if you go and look for it. Decide the universe is, say, run by secret enormous teddy bears, and I can guarantee you'll immediately start running across evidence that this is true.Collection: Running
The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and wounds can heal. All of these things are true.Collection: Views
Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.Collection: Art
Libraries are our friends.Collection: Book
Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.Collection: Following Instructions
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.Collection: Writing
There's none so blind as those who will not listen.Collection: Blind
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.Collection: Song
Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.Collection: Civilization
My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.Collection: Wall
I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.Collection: Sanctuary
Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.Collection: Mistake
The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.Collection: People
It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart.Collection: Heart
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.Collection: Heal
She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.Collection: Ocean
He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.Collection: Taken
Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.Collection: Memories
There are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet.Collection: Hate
We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.Collection: Years
Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.Collection: Optimism
You don't have to stay anywhere forever.Collection: Forever
We often confuse what we wish for with what is.Collection: Confused
When things get tough... Make good art.Collection: Art
Freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.Collection: Giving
From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.Collection: Magic
I think you're doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You're growing a new heart, for a start.Collection: Heart
I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.Collection: Writing
Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.Collection: Virginia
I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.Collection: People
I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.Collection: Clay
I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I'm not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, "But he was really good at that. Why isn't he still doing it?"Collection: Leaving
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.Collection: Mistake
The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi.Collection: Nice
I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work.Collection: May