Best Neil Gaiman Quotes & Sayings

It's a piece of piss. You know what I do? I just get up and read the paper. Then people ask questions, and I just bullshit. Actively bullshit, as opposed to passively. That's the best bit. Just bullshitting. Piece of utter piss. — Neil Gaiman

I wrote, and sometimes, when I was stuck, I hit the road. I ate pasties in the Upper Peninsula and hush puppies in Cairo. I did my best not to write about any place I had not been. — Neil Gaiman

I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on the pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. — Neil Gaiman

Richard was not an enthusiastic holder of pigeons, even at the best of times. — Neil Gaiman

Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word - as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked. — Neil Gaiman

Death has a body like a model, the clothes of a poet and the smile of your best friend. She wears a top hat for fun, her ankh necklace for power, and carries a big black umbrella for travelling to the 'sunless lands.' I wonder what she smells like? I'm sure it's fresh and clean and her laugh must be rinkly or maybe it's warm and chuckly, but whatever it is, Death laughs a lot.
We talk about the 'miracle of birth' but what about the 'miracle of death'? We have the science of death pretty much figured out, but death's magic and inevitability have been feared and ignored for a long time now.
What if Death is a person? — 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 assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best. — Neil Gaiman

... prison was at best, only a temporary reprieve from life,for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down, even when you've been taken off the board;life goes on, even if it's life under a microscope or life in cage. And second, if you just hang in there, some day they're going to have to let you out. — Neil Gaiman

No sleep?" asked Shadow, smiling. "I don't sleep. It's overrated. A bad habit I do my best to avoid - in company, wherever possible, and the young lady may go off the boil if I don't get back to her. — Neil Gaiman

One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. — Neil Gaiman

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did. — Neil Gaiman

What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don't you agree? — Neil Gaiman

Skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny snakes. Rain washed his face. "This is the best," he shouted, over the roar of the storm. As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher, every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through the dark clouds. "In my dream, I was hunting you," said Shadow, his words ripped away by the wind. "In my dream. I had to bring back a feather." Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind. They — Neil Gaiman

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write. — Neil Gaiman

The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi. — Neil Gaiman

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious. — Neil Gaiman

I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work. — Neil Gaiman

To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love. — Neil Gaiman

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this. — Neil Gaiman

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming. — Neil Gaiman

Mister Trod?" said Bod. "Tell me about revenge."
"Dish best served cold." said Nehemiah Trot. — Neil Gaiman

And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence." "They kill themselves, you mean?" said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid. "Indeed." "Does it work? Are they happier dead?" "Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean." "Sort of," said Bod. — Neil Gaiman

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. — Neil Gaiman

Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction ... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem. — Neil Gaiman

But eventually everything was back the way it had been before, except for Lucy's father's second-best tuba, which had sustained severe jam damage.
So Lucy's father sold his second-best tuba and bought a sousaphone instead, which he had always wanted. — Neil Gaiman

Some years ago a writer not much older than I am now told me (not bitterly, but matter-of-factly) that it was a good thing that I, as a young writer, did not have to face the darkness that he faced every day, the knowledge that his best work was behind him. And another, in his eighties, told me that what kept him going every day was the knowledge that his best work was still out there, the great work that he would one day do.
I aspire to the condition of the second of my friends, I like the idea that one day I'll do something that really works, even if I fear that I've been saying the same things for over thirty years. As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we've done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore. — Neil Gaiman

Tell me about revenge." "Dish best served cold," said Nehemiah Trot. "Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. — Neil Gaiman

If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. — Neil Gaiman

None of this is truly happening," he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. "It's all in your head. Best not to think of it. — 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.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they're going 'this is an individual writing with his own point of view'.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there's nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can. — Neil Gaiman

If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. — Neil Gaiman

I don't think you get perfect couples. At best you get two people building something, and working at it, and loving each other, and doing their best to communicate. — Neil Gaiman

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong - in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art ... Someone on the internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn't even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art. — Neil Gaiman

"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them. — Neil Gaiman

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.
I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same? — Neil Gaiman

I will write in words of fire.
I will write them on your skin.
I will write about desire.
Write beginnings, write of sin.
You're the book I love the best,
your skin only holds my truth,
you will be a palimpsest
lines of age rewriting youth.
You will not burn upon the pyre.
Or be buried on the shelf.
You're my letter to desire:
And you'll never read yourself.
I will trace each word and comma
As the final dusk descends,
You're my tale of dreams and drama,
Let us find out how it ends. — Neil Gaiman

I'll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life. — Neil Gaiman

I hope the strong women out there aren't quiet and they don't go away, because when people attack you for speaking, the best way to drive them nuts is to smile and carry on speaking, louder, more wisely, more intensely, more articulately than ever. — Neil Gaiman

Well, you're grown-ups," she said, in a tone of voice that did its best to imply that they weren't, and that even if they were they shouldn't be. — Neil Gaiman

I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do. — Neil Gaiman

In the future, when Joss Whedon and I are best friends and hanging out together in my tree fort, I hope Neil Gaiman comes over too. — Patrick Rothfuss

It wasn't the best place to go for a walk, really. There were all these things that people had thrown away back there - old cookers and broken dishes and dolls with no arms and no legs and empty cans and broken bottles. Mum and Dad made me promise not to go exploring back there, because there were too many sharp things, and tetanus and such. — Neil Gaiman

We played checkers," said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. "The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer."
The two Zoryas nodded gravely. "Such a pity," Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. "In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children."
"That is why you are a good fortune-teller, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were effort for her to be up so late. "You tell the best lies. — Neil Gaiman

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself
his clothes, his manner, his carriage
as a grand joke.
There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.
It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more.
And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it. — Neil Gaiman

You'll just have to make the best of it down here," he said to Richard, "in the sewers and the magic and the dark. — Neil Gaiman

The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true. — Neil Gaiman

I hope you know what you are doing." "Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best. In — Neil Gaiman

You're no help, he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could. — Neil Gaiman

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ... and it's magic and wonderful and strange. — Neil Gaiman

I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing. — Neil Gaiman

There aren't any good guys, and there aren't any bad guys. There's just us. People. Doing our best to get by — Neil Gaiman

Sometimes, in interviews, I am asked whether The Endless are a dysfunctional family. I do not believe i have ever observed a "functional" family, families are comprised, in equal measure, of unquestioning and undeserved love and of unquestioning and cruelly undeserved irritation: we muddle along s best we can. And that's the best that can be said for us. — Neil Gaiman

In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing."

"Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best. — Neil Gaiman

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead. — Neil Gaiman

Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I'm not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head. — Neil Gaiman

This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair. — Neil Gaiman

The Doctor had a remarkable memory. The problem was, there was so much of it. He had lived eleven lives (or more: there was another life, was there not, that he tried his best never to think about) and he had a different way of remembering things in each life.
The worst part of being however old he was (and he had long since abandoned trying to keep track of it in any way that mattered to anybody but him) was that sometimes things didn't arrive in his head quite when they were meant to. — Neil Gaiman

LARRY NIVEN is best known as a science-fiction writer. — Neil Gaiman

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops. — Neil Gaiman

It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk-cartons
although I can't remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk-carton
and on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me? — Neil Gaiman

And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too. — Neil Gaiman

A novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, — Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie's mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of "Back! Foul best of Hell!" followed by gasps of "Is it alive?" and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers. — Neil Gaiman

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow. — Neil Gaiman

Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time. — Neil Gaiman

It's a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best if everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. — Neil Gaiman

My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat. — Neil Gaiman

No, look, there's a blue box. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it's meant to go. And when it turns up, there's a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed 'cause he's awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch 'Blink'. — Neil Gaiman

I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin. — Neil Gaiman

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician - make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor - make good art. IRS on your trail - make good art. Cat exploded - make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before - make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn't even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too. — Neil Gaiman

Maybe there weren't any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. — Neil Gaiman

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

The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it. — Neil Gaiman

Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers. — Neil Gaiman

You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.
It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay.
Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world ... and I like that. — Neil Gaiman