Neil Richard Gaiman sayings

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

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

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players, (ie everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

“He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.”

“It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”

“And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize. Their hearts desire, their dream....But the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.

” “Nobody's cool, if you've got kids.”

“We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.”

“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten”

“Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close in”

“I'll come to you tonight, dear, when it's late,
You will not see me; you may feel a chill.
I'll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,
And that will be your future on a plate.
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.”

“I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.”

“Stardust.”

“This one's for you.”

“Charitably...I think...Sometimes perhaps one must change or die. And in the end, there were perhaps limits to how much he could let himself change.”

“Archimedes said that with a long enough lever and a solid enough place to stand, he could move the world.

“You are time. Foul time, who steals the gold from a maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from a child's eyes. Dark time, who has stolen from every thing there ever was all the things that it held precious and divine... And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave.”

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."

"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."

"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."

"People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime."

"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."

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."

"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind."

"[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... "

"Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.

"I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?"

"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."

"There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

Whenever it rains you will think of her. "

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life."

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?"

"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due."

Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. "

"Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us."

"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

"I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept."

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!"

"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets."

"Even nothing cannot last forever."

You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

"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."

"All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them."

"I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said.... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived."

"Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time."

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But is this is all there is, then I don't want

to be sane. "

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."

"Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel."

"If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained."

"Lucifer protests he was never to blame for inducing anyone to sin, and that he’s never had an interest in owning souls: 'They die, and they come here – having transgressed against what they believed to be right – and expect us to fulfill their desire for pain and retribution. I don’t make them come here… I need no souls. And how can anyone own a soul? No, they belong to themselves. They just hate to have to face up to it."

"...So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all."

"Every hour wounds. The last one kills."

"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets."

"What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?"

"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit."

"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. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend..."

"Even nothing cannot last forever."

"You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

"All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them."

"I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said.... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived."

"Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time."

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But is this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane. "

"Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore."

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."

"Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain."

"Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel."

"If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained."

"People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghost, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen."

"Lucifer protests he was never to blame for inducing anyone to sin, and that he’s never had an interest in owning souls: 'They die, and they come here – having transgressed against what they believed to be right – and expect us to fulfill their desire for pain and retribution. I don’t make them come here… I need no souls. And how can anyone own a soul? No, they belong to themselves. They just hate to have to face up to it."

"...So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all."

"Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own? ...I have given my heart to another."

"The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?"

"Yes."

"You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do."

"Nonetheless, he has my heart. I hope your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it."

"Every hour wounds. The last one kills."

"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."

"It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be."


"You don't have to stay anywhere forever."

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen."

I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time...but I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night...'strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?"

"The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true."

"You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer

"Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken."

"Beware of Doors."

"He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called."

I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it."

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

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names."

"Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must."

"...set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes...

"You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies.

I miss you', he admitted.
'I'm here', she said.
'That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost of the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then."

Love belongs to Desire. And Desire is always Cruel. -Old Man

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely."

You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.

"The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sout with the same tongue."

You're brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don't care if you are imaginary."

There's none so blind as those who will not listen."

Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped."

"We are small but we are many
We are many we are small
We were here before you rose
We will be here when you fall"

Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one."

We often confuse what we wish for with what is."

What do stars do? They shine."

This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things."

They might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés"

"Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure.

Face your life,
It's pain,
It's pleasure,
Leave no path untaken."

"Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names."

"Mind the gap!"

"Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost."

"But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."

"Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead"

"The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows."

"Mirrors,' she said, 'are never to be trusted."

"I was a stranger and you took me in.

Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence."

"Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all."

"Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish."

"The quickest way is sometimes the longest."

When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel."

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?'
'Different woman,' said Mr. Nancy. 'Same Deal."

"I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies"