Neil Gaiman
I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.Collection: Writing
I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.Collection: Writing
The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It's a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.Collection: Mirrors
As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.Collection: Theatre
If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.Collection: Morning
I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.Collection: Block
I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Writing
It seems like every time I agree to work with a video game company they go out of business. I stopped because I was starting to feel guilty.Collection: Games
"Ocean" is more about ... powerlessness and hopelessness. When we're very small we can't actually do anything - we have no say in what happens, we have no money or resources, we sometimes have no idea what's going on.Collection: Ocean
I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.Collection: Book
I think I love my dreaming process because one of the things that my dreaming process does is sort out stories for me.Collection: Dream
People can get involved in wonderfully creative ways that have nothing to do with you, but spark off things you begin with.Collection: People
I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.Collection: Art
I realized the other day that about the only author I genuinely read for pure pleasure is one of the worst authors in the world, a guy called Harry Stephen Keeler, a long dead American mystery writer. He was probably the greatest bad writer America ever produced.Collection: America
It's one thing to want money, but if you find yourself choking on a coin as you wake, the money is slightly less desirable.Collection: Finding Yourself
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.Collection: Mistake
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.Collection: About Writing
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: Stories
I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you’ve done something.Collection: Mistake
You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.Collection: Design
One word after another. That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.Collection: Night
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.Collection: Reading
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.Collection: Book
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.Collection: Reading
The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.Collection: Stories
You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.Collection: Real
Stories are the things that allow us to persuade each other that we’re human.Collection: Stories
Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading – do not discourage children from reading because you feel they’re reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.Collection: Reading
First rule of magic: Don’t let anyone know your real name. Names have power.Collection: Real
Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you’re waiting for someone to publish the first thing...Collection: Firsts
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you’re a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.Collection: Stories
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: Reading
People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.Collection: Stories
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.Collection: Book
A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people’s heads. Books are good that way.Collection: Book
I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it’s very, very classical, and in some ways I’m breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can’t do.Collection: Book
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf ’cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.Collection: Book
Real life doesn’t have to be convincing, but fiction does.Collection: Real
I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.Collection: Stories
I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?Collection: Fun
Going off the grid is always good for me. It’s the way that I’ve started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.Collection: Book
Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.Collection: Stories
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they’re scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too.Collection: Real