Neil Gaiman
Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.Collection: Children
I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.Collection: Gun
It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.Collection: Believe
Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?Collection: Trying
"Death's a capricious thing, innit?" "Yes. Yes, she is."Collection: Capricious
Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.Collection: Memories
It's just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe...But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind, and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.Collection: Adventure
You're a poem?' I repeated. She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.' 'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?' 'What's your name?' 'Enn.' 'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?Collection: Race
I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.Collection: Children
The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow to the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.Collection: Cutting
There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.Collection: Heart
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.Collection: Life
We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fallCollection: Fall
Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.Collection: Powerful
He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.Collection: Home
Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?" Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. "He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus." Josiah Worthington said, "He looks more like my head gardener, Stebbins. Not that I'm suggesting Stebbins as a name. The man drank like a fish." "He looks like my nephew Harry," said Mother Slaughter... "He looks like nobody but himself," said Mrs.Owens, firmly. "He looks like nobody." "Then Nobody it is," said Silas. "Nobody Owens.Collection: Mother
He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.Collection: Wise
Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me over.Collection: Rocks
The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water." Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.Collection: Strong
Well," he said, "f’r example, if they ask where you’ve come from, you could say ‘Behind me,’and if they asked where you’re going, you’d say ‘In front of me.Collection: Example
You know you can set fire to the capacity to say.Collection: Fire
If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.Collection: Country
If people are standing up there saying, my football team just won with help from God, then obviously God just pissed over the other team.Collection: Football
Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story.Collection: Song
To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.Collection: Moving
Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.Collection: Writing
Imagine a mosaic picture of a house in the country: lots of red and blue and yellow and black and brown and white and a dozen different shades of green tiles which make a beautiful picture if you stand back far enough. All the little red squares are true - true things, true places, true feelings. But the red squares aren't the picture. All the rest of it is lies and stories, often within the same sentence.Collection: Beautiful
According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea.Collection: Daughter
If you go to space, you'll look down and see no national boundaries. You'll never see the gods people are killing each other over, but they're incredibly real.Collection: Real
I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.Collection: Thinking
Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.Collection: Eye
I think radio plays are my favourite medium, as they make the listener work and create and contribute in a way that TV and film can never do, and they have an immediacy that written prose often lacks.Collection: Thinking
There may be a parallel between woodcuts and radio; radio plays are a living art form everywhere except the USA.Collection: Art
If you read enough Lionel Fanthorpe, your brain starts to turn to jelly and just dribbles out of your ears.Collection: Brain
I was bright, and I could use that as a weapon: words can wound, whatever those sticks and stones sayings claim about them never hurting, and I could use them if I had to.Collection: Hurt
I'm probably slightly more famous than I've been comfortable with. Famous enough to have my phone calls returned is about as famous as I want to be.Collection: Phones
Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.Collection: Details
I was a book-y child. I was much more book-y than dark.Collection: Children
My parents would frisk me before family events, and find the book, and lock it in the car. And then be disappointed where, somewhere at the event, I would find a book and sit under a table where nobody could get me and go back into book land.Collection: Book
None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.Collection: Fun
I like comic conventions. I genuinely like comic conventions. I like wandering around from table to table; I like wandering up and down Artist's Alley and saying "Hello" to people. I like hanging out on the DC booth. I can't do that anymore. I'd like to, but I can't. I physically can't. If I stop moving, somebody will come up to me with something to sign, and if I sign it, somehow it's like ants sensing sugar. There will be fifty or a hundred people around me and then fire marshals will come and then I'm trapped in a crowd. It's bizarre.Collection: Moving
There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.Collection: Art
Love isn't quite desire... Love is probably a little bit in The Sandman's domain. Love is partly a dream, it's partly to do with desire, and sometimes it's partly to do with death, as well. It's also very often something to do with delirium.Collection: Dream
I don't necessarily think stories have functions any more than diamonds have functions, or the sky has a function... Stories exist. They keep us sane, I think. We tell each other stories, we believe stories. I love watching the slow rise of the urban legend. They're the stories that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.Collection: Believe
In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.Collection: Looks
I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.Collection: Facts
The thin girl was gulping down one of Richard's bananas in what was, Richard reflected, the least erotic display of banana-eating he had ever seen.Collection: Girl
Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.Collection: Mirrors
There was no moon but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too and lights on buildings and on bridges which looked like earthbound stars and they glimmered repeated as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It’s fairyland thought Richard.Collection: Stars