Neil Gaiman Quotes

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

~ Neil Gaiman

You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly... But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you... What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?

~ Neil Gaiman

I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?

~ Neil Gaiman

But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there.

~ Neil Gaiman

Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?No.

~ Neil Gaiman

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.

~ Neil Gaiman

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

~ Neil Gaiman

Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

~ Neil Gaiman

The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.

~ Neil Gaiman

Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.

~ Neil Gaiman

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.

~ Neil Gaiman

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)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...

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.

~ Neil Gaiman

There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say We don't quite understand... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules and sometimes when they say that to me I explain that I am sure it does, just as life has rules, but they didn't give me a rule book to life when I was born, and I've been trying to figure it out as I go along, and I am sure it is the same thing for magic; and sometimes I explain that, yes, the magic has rules, and if they read again carefully they can figure out what they are; and sometimes I sigh and put in a line here and a line there that spells things out, says, YES THESE ARE THE RULES YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION and then everyone is very happy.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

Hasn't there always been a moon?Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue...

~ Neil Gaiman

Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify.“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.

~ Neil Gaiman

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

~ Neil Gaiman

This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.

~ Neil Gaiman

Leave no path untaken.

~ Neil Gaiman

Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.ü

~ Neil Gaiman

Yes, you're right. It's part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having.

~ Neil Gaiman

Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's a weapon, I understand?In the wrong hands, all tools are weapons. In the right hands, everything is a weapon, or nothing is.

~ Neil Gaiman

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?Neil Gaiman: Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au

~ Neil Gaiman

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?

~ Neil Gaiman

To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best. -Destruction

~ Neil Gaiman