Neil Gaiman Quotes

A philosopher once asked, Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human? Pointless, really...Do the stars gaze back? Now, that's a question.

~ Neil Gaiman

Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?

~ Neil Gaiman

Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.

~ Neil Gaiman

I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why.

~ Neil Gaiman

And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...

~ Neil Gaiman

What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

~ Neil Gaiman

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

~ Neil Gaiman

You are almost never cool to your children.

~ Neil Gaiman

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

~ Neil Gaiman

Shadow was a couple of a hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger.

~ Neil Gaiman

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood.) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home. The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.

~ Neil Gaiman

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 watchig?

~ Neil Gaiman

Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.

~ Neil Gaiman

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

~ Neil Gaiman

My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’“ said Shadow.“Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’”“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do.”Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.

~ Neil Gaiman

Some things are too big to be seen, some emotions are too huge to be felt.

~ Neil Gaiman

And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

~ Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.

~ Neil Gaiman

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

~ Neil Gaiman

You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.

~ Neil Gaiman

This book is the book you have just read. It’s done.

~ Neil Gaiman

The dead can't hurt you, they're dead. Living things can hurt you, living people can hurt you but the dead can't.

~ Neil Gaiman

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.

~ Neil Gaiman

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

~ Neil Gaiman

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

~ Neil Gaiman

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?Stories. And they give me hope.

~ Neil Gaiman

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

~ Neil Gaiman

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

~ Neil Gaiman

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

~ Neil Gaiman

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.

~ Neil Gaiman

Without stories, we are incomplete.

~ Neil Gaiman

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

~ Neil Gaiman

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)

~ Neil Gaiman

Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena.

~ Neil Gaiman

I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true.

~ Neil Gaiman

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.

~ Neil Gaiman