Quotes by Neil Gaiman

"There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories."

"So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech."

"The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that."

"A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up."

"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 short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it."

"Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed."

"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."

"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 hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something."

"The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked...that's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

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

"Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort."

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

"Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."

"I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them."

"Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't."

"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."

"It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling."

"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning."

"The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography."

"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."

"A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it."

"The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."

"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."

"'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies."

"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different."

"I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction."

"I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect."

"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."

"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."

"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."