Neil Gaiman Quotes

"It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you."

Look, I'm sorry it's over too. But good things have to end, stories have to end. It's what gives them meaning.

Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.

“You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.”

In my family “adventure” tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine.” Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “what she did that morning.” Going to the wrong part of a supermarket car park and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.

I was pleased to get a copy of Roger Zelazny's novel Lord of Light the other day. It's one of my favourite books (I think the first thing author Steve Brust ever said to me was "Let's have an argument. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light is the best book anyone's ever written." "Ah," I said, "If you make it best SF book of the 1960s, I'll go along with it." "Oh. Fair enough." It was the first of a long line of failed arguments.) It's got a blurb from me on it, which I hope sells many copies.

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

Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking.

“Were you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“A madman. With a time machine.”
“Oh, no. It took ages until I got the time machine.”

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow.

You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn't true. I know a lot about love. I've seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate... It made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves... You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... What I'm trying to say, Tristan is... I think I love you. Is this love, Tristan? I never imagined I'd know it for myself. My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange - no gifts. No goods. No demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.

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

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.