Neil Gaiman
I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.Collection: Giving
When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.Collection: Looks
There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.Collection: Artist
Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad.Collection: Jesus
Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.Collection: Ideas
We have to get the... the thing I got... to the Angel. And then he'll tell Door about her family, and he'll tell me how to get home." Lamia looked at Hunter with delight. "And he can give you brains," she said, cheerfully, "and me a heart.Collection: Home
What's it like then?" asked Old Bailey. "Being dead?" The marquis sighed. And then he twisted his lips up into a smile, and with a glitter of his old self, he replied, "Live long enough, Old Bailey, and you can find out for yourself.Collection: Self
It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.Collection: Growing Up
The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.Collection: Memories
We...we could be friends.' We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.Collection: Cat
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.Collection: Lying
Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope.Collection: Dream
Nobody's seen Jesus in years.Collection: Jesus
I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.Collection: Deny
Now Coraline," said Miss Spink, "what's your name?" "Coraline," said Coraline. "And we don't know each other, do we?" Coraline looked at the thin young woman with black button eyes and shook her head slowly.Collection: Eye
I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it.Collection: Mean
Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.Collection: Men
I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.Collection: Dream
There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.Collection: Eye
On the first day Coraline's family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.Collection: Missing
Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.Collection: Girl
It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.Collection: Queens
I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.Collection: Wish
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.Collection: Shy
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.Collection: Hero
It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.Collection: Dark
One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.Collection: I've Learned
Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted.Collection: Mirrors
She took my hands in her, then, and squeezed them. 'But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn't listen to them. Well done. That's quality, that is,' and she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear.Collection: Hands
I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.Collection: Mirrors
So you used to know everything?" She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars.Collection: Stars
The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.Collection: Fields
It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.Collection: Growing Up
You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.Collection: Imagine
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.Collection: Sandman
I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.Collection: Real
Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.Collection: Dark
She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.Collection: Children
I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.Collection: Children
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.Collection: Home
I thought, I'm going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.Collection: Thinking
I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?Collection: Mirrors
In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.Collection: Dream
If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.Collection: Two
I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something.Collection: Graduation
Whenever it rains you will think of her.Collection: Rain
Fear is contagious. You can catch it.Collection: Fear
It's just I might get distracted, and I get lost kind of easily, and sometimes I have really bad days...when, you know, I just want to hide or scream or bleed or something, and...all that...Collection: Suicide
You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.Collection: Book