Neil Gaiman Quotes

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens

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.

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart.

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you

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.

Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you'll see the world If

Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken...

Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure...

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.

Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's

Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure.

Face your life,
It's pain,
It's pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.. Neil Gaiman

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a

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.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car

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.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me:

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''

He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.. Neil Gaiman

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

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.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

So 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.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.

If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.

But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

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.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

I think all - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around.

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.

You're Hell's Angels, then? What chapter are you from?'

'REVELATIONS. CHAPTER SIX.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’

Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘... Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.

He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

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.

Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

You have a very open relationship with your fans."

"Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.

Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.

So many things to see, people to do.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story. (from 'Instructions')

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.

I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

Let's start a new tomorrow, today.

Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

Tell your story. Don't try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Any starting writer starts out with other people's voices. But as quickly as you can start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there will always be better writers than you and there will always be smarter writers than you, but you are the only you.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

I think . . . I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.'

'If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,' was all she said.

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back.

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Everything that is,casts a shadow

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

• The moon in the duckpond was full as well, and I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who had gone fishing in a lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky. And, of course, it always is.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

So," he asked. "How's death?"
"Hard," she said. "It just keeps going.

The only reason people die, is because EVERYONE does it. You all just go along with it.
It's RUBBISH, death. It's STUPID. I don't want nothing to do with it.

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.

I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.
Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?"
"Then what died? who are you mourning?"
"A point of view.

You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Charitably... I think... sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.

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.

All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"

"No, Matthew. What do they say?"

"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

DEATH: "Mostly they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear."

MORPHEUS: "And I am far more terrible than you, sister.

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.

I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.

Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commits acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.

They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak.

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

I am hope.

There is hope for you,’ said the Queen. ‘You believe you are my only hope, but, truthfully, I am yours.

I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.

Gee-word?"
"Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?"
"Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.

Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar.
“What number am I thinking of?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.

Sexton: I think the whole world's gone mad.
Death: Uh-uh. It's always like this. You probably just don't get out enough.

I really don't know what "I love you" means.
I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.

You cannot hear a poem without it changing you

She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.

It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.

He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.

Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Books were safer than other people anyway.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

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.

Reading is important.
Books are important.
Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.

Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.

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.

The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.

I was going to the library, too. I'd get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me by making me take sandwiches. I was absolutely fine given the prospect of a day spent with books and not eating.

Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world.

Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow.
“In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,” said Crawly. “I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ‘Don’t Touch’ in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere - it doesn’t all get used up at once.”
“I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.

And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?

I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared.

...but fear of death gives us strength.

Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now.

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing."

[The Guardian, 15 October 2013]

He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.

That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.

It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?

So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.

You got a lifetime. No more. No less.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith."

"You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.

The abbot cleared his throat. "You are all very stupid people," he told them graciously, "and you do not know anything at all.

CHORONZON "I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, Gods, worlds... of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"

MORPHEUS "I am hope.

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the fairy reel

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.

You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Where does contagion end and art begin?

The one thing 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. 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.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.

If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art.

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.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.

Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.

The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

Idris: Are all people like this?
The Doctor: Like what?
Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing."

Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.

Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

You hurt. It's okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.

Scuse me,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter? Your dreams is spillin’ over into my dreams, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been doin’ with, it’s dates. William the Conker, ten sixty-six, that’s as far as I go, and I’d swap that for a dancing mouse.

So what I want to know is, when I'm asleep, do I really remember how to fly? And forget how when I wake up? Or am I just dreaming I can fly?"

"When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget."

"But that's not fair!"

"No.

I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

But then it occured to him that any progress he had made on his quest so far he had made by accepting the help that had been offered to him.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughing-stock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams are gone. That's the power of songs.

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.

I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.

Nothing's ever the same," she said. Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.

They weren't making much sense; she decided they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses, but which can go on for ever, if both parties are willing.

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter.

You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.
'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.

Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.
It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.

It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never looked at it, not looked at it.

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.

Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

You aren't allowed out of the graveyard -it's aren't, by the way, not amn't, not these days-because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet.

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague.

If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little wish hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The age when you ran with the wild hunt, or hunted terrified humans, it's over.

How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline.
"I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave."
"Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline.
"Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.

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."

[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]

The irritating question they ask us - us being writers - is: "Where do you get your ideas?"
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?"
"Easy," said the cat. "Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it."
"Small world," said Coraline.
"It's big enough for her," said the cat. "Spider's webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.

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