Neil Gaiman

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

I think I love my dreaming process because one of the things that my dreaming process does is sort out stories for me.

In film, a lot of the time you're not as engaged, it is all being given to you, and you're accepting it as it comes in, but in comics, as a reader, you are going to have to work, your imagination needs to do an awful lot.

The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic: There is whoever is writing it, and whoever is drawing it, and then there's whoever is reading it, because the really important things in comics are occurring in the panel gutters, they're occurring between panels as the person reading the comics is moving you through, is creating a film in their heads.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled....

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.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

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

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

When I was young I was a fool. So wrap me up in dreams and death.

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

The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.

Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It's quiet.

Time is fluid here', said the Demon.

She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones)

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world there's a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail is-well, it's magic, isn't it? Perhaps it's a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. That's how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that.

Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight.

I already killed you once today, what does it take to teach some people?

Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

She found herself to be quite worried that something would jump out at her, so she began to whistle. She thought it might make it harder for things to jump out at her, if she was whistling.

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. \'spiders' webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.\' Coraline shivered.

This is not a place, after all. It is BETWEEN places. This is NOWHERE. A brief thought: I could stay here, abandon my quest, hang forever in the void, safe and cold and alone.

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.

Make glorious and fantastic mistakes.

When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.