I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
He'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT, Good Omens
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend ... I can pretend that things last.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives
The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.
NEIL GAIMAN, "Only the End of the World Again," Smoke and Mirrors
Human beings mostly aren't [evil]. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT, Good Omens
Life and death are different sides of the same coin.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT, Good Omens
Gods die when they are forgotten.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
There's no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
NEIL GAIMAN, Signal to Noise
I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Sandman: Endless Nights
This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
It's not the fish you catch, it's the peace of mind you take home at the end of the day.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you -- even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors. The secret is this: people gamble to LOSE money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It's a sacrifice, of sorts.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
Even Nothing cannot last forever.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.
Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2013
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So 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, "Neil Gaiman's 8 Good Writing Practices", Advice to Writers
It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.
NEIL GAIMAN, Anansi Boys
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.
NEIL GAIMAN, Good Omens
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'What kind of tea?'
NEIL GAIMAN, attributed, Tea: A Miscellany Steeped with Trivia, History and Recipes
A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really... "Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.
NEIL GAIMAN, Stardust
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. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
NEIL GAIMAN, "Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming", The Guardian, October 15, 2013
Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.
NEIL GAIMAN, Stardust
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Graveyard Book
Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing.
NEIL GAIMAN, Anansi Boys
For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
The best thing ... 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, American Gods
Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.
NEIL GAIMAN, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters."
NEIL GAIMAN, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.
NEIL GAIMAN, Season of Mists
Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?
NEIL GAIMAN, Fables & Reflections
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city -- here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screans predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call.
NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods
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