"Trying to be the same as everyone else is a strategy that kind of works in school.  When you get out into the world, it is differences that make you glorious."

"Sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving."

"Where it all came from—the other mother with her button eyes, the rats, the hand, the sad voices of the ghost-children—I have no real idea. It built itself and told itself, a word at a time."

"I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. 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."

"Everything changes when we read."

"It's not one-to-one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."

"Give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers."

"Graphic novels!  These books reach readers no other books can.  They're opening the doors of verbal literacy for visual learners and helping strong verbal readers become visually literate.  I LOVE them."

"I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast."

"I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do."

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win."

"Things took a more dramatic turn for me when I stumbled across The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. ... I didn't know Bester was a legend in the field.  Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction, but at the time I didn't know who he was, either.  I just decided to try it ... and it just blew my mind.  I think of The Stars My Destination as my origin story: reading that book made me want to find more books that could blow my mind like that."

"I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that I believe you think."

"I rage at the imminent loss of my friend.  And I think, What would Terry do with this anger?  Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands."

"I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, and of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter."

"I felt almost dishonorable accepting people's thanks. I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library; fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it."  (artist)

"I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of [the authors] in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night. Read the books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire's golden light."

"I tend to write about things from wherever I am standing, and that means I include possibly too much me in the things I write."

"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 - "Exploring Models of Online Storytelling"

"I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile too."

"Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real."

"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."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities ... A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time. ... There are good cities—the ones that welcome you, that seem to care about you, that seem pleased you’re in them. There are indifferent cities—the ones that honestly don't care if you're there or not; cities with their own agendas, the ones that ignore people. There are cities gone bad, and there are places in otherwise healthy cities as rotten and maggoty as windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost—some, lacking a center, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand. Some cities spread, like cancers or B-movie slime monsters, devouring all in their way, absorbing towns and villages, swallowing boroughs and hamlets, transmuting into boundless conurbations. Other cities shrink—once prosperous areas empty and fail: buildings empty, windows are boarded up, people leave, and sometimes they cannot even tell you why. ... Don't ever take a city for granted. After all, it is bigger than you are; it is older; and it has learned how to wait." (artist)

"I fled, or at least, backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up. I did not want to be nailed to the truth; or to be more accurate, I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts."

"What matters to me is that they have the books and they love them. ... And they'll tell people about them."

"I will sign anything. ... If they can't afford a new book, I'll give them something to read and enjoy in the meantime. They'll pass it on to their friends."

"In order for stories to work—for kids and for adults—they should scare.  And you should triumph.  There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary."

"That's the purpose of stories, that's what they're for: They make life worth living and, sometimes, they keep us alive."

"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.)"

"If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies—Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology.  Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff."

"Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

"You have to finish things—that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."

"The most important thing that I think fiction does [is that] it lets us look out through other eyes... but it also gives us empathy.  The act of looking out through other eyes tells us something huge and important, which is that other people exist. ... One of the things that fiction can give us is just the realization that behind every pair of eyes, there's somebody like us."

"What felt magic can becomes either undone or overdone when you try to make a story out of it. Especially when you're a story-maker. Neil is. I am. We both are. I watch the story unfold. Sometimes I dictate the story to myself, then sometimes to the world. Sometimes I take dictation. Sometimes I get it wrong."

"I love the idea also that sometimes, if you're actually going to write realistic fiction, you're going to have to include fantasy."

"Stories should change you - GOOD stories should change you."

"You like what you like. Nobody can tell you to like something that you don't, or not to like something you do—or if they do, it's not going to change anything in your head, no more than they can be made to like or dislike garlic or lobster or chocolate or olives or natto by you telling them to change their minds.  I don't expect everyone to love everything I write. I don't think that if you like something I write you'll like the next thing, any more than I love everything that the people whose work I enjoy do.  There are Dickens novels I think as good as anything anyone’s ever done, and Dickens books I will be very happy never to read again or think of again. I'm happy to know that my judgment is subjective, but then, that's the whole point of having a point of view.  I published American Gods after Stardust, and most of the people who loved Stardust did not love American Gods, and the people who loved American Gods and picked up Stardust next were often very disappointed indeed. And I am proud of both of them, as I am of all my art-children..."

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick—a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."

"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."

"I'm occasionally baffled when young writers ask me for advice, and I give it, and then I see comments that say that none of my advice applies because I'm a best-selling author. As if I had spent my whole life as a best-selling author, and had never been anything else..."

"It's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."

"The biggest pitfall to avoid is not writing. Not writing is really, really easy to do, especially if you're a young writer. The hope that elves will come in the night and finish it for you, is a very common one to have. That is my main recommendation. You have to write, and you have to finish what you write and beyond that, it's all detail."

"Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams."

"You have to write when you're not 'inspired.' ...And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you're going to look back and you're not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written."

"There's so many more things I need to write before the long night comes, before I put the pen down for the last time."

Fortunately, the Milk

"It was the idea of going back and telling all these stories and all these things that I know and other people don't know. So why don't I tell them?"

The Wolves in the Walls

The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains

The Ocean at the End of the Lane