Neil Gaiman Quotes

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

~ Neil Gaiman

I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes, I want you with me.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.

~ Neil Gaiman

Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. 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 remarkable difficult to kill.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head

~ Neil Gaiman

We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

~ Neil Gaiman

Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.

~ Neil Gaiman

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.

~ Neil Gaiman

The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved.

~ Neil Gaiman

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song...Curry’s nice too pointed out Fat Charlie

~ Neil Gaiman

...Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there... has the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it's almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese.

~ Neil Gaiman

You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.

~ Neil Gaiman

I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

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.

~ Neil Gaiman

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

~ Neil Gaiman

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

~ Neil Gaiman

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

~ Neil Gaiman