Neil Gaiman

“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”

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

“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.”

“There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.”

“Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.”

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

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

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

“Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?”

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

“Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.”

“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.”

“I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.”

“You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.”

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

“And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.”

“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”

“A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.”

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

“She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knee his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattooed on his arm and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored the hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.”