Quotes from Neil Gaiman

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

A book is a dream you hold in your hands

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style.

If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear. Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

People who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.

Are you scared?' asked Mr. Ibis. 'Not really.' 'Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.

I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.