Neil Gaiman Quotes

“I suppose you must be looking forward to them sorting all this out,” he said. “Er. The Palestinian situation. The politics.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to Jerusalem,” she said. “The people come. The people believe. Then they kill each other, to prove that God loves them.”
“Well,” he said. “How would you fix it?”
She smiled her whitest smile. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think it would be best if it was bombed. If it was bombed back to a radioactive desert. Then who would want it? But then I think, they would come here and collect the radioactive dust that might contain atoms of the Dome of the Rock, or of the Temple, or a wall that Christ leaned against on his way to the Cross. People would fight over who owns a poisonous desert, if that desert was Jerusalem.

“Come to Jerusalem and go mad,” said Morrison. “Not much of an advertising slogan.”

Jerusalem, thought Morrison, was like a deep pool, where time had settled too thickly.

I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.

In May I received an anonymous Mother’s Day card. This puzzled me. I would have noticed if I had ever had children, surely?

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 am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

I thought about it. “Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city; there can be a hundred roads, a thousands paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”
Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, “You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at the palm of my right hand.
She said, “I see death in your past and death in your future.”
“Death waits in all our futures,” I said.

I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night.
The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.

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

Writers live in houses other people built.

He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that’s a positive thing rather than an absence of character.

He was demonstrating to the world the writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic.

I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.