Neil Gaiman, the British-born, US-based author renowned for blending modern reality with the fantastic, is an inspiration in multiple storytelling mediums.
Starting as a freelance journalist, he broadened his canvas, creating the critically acclaimed comic series The Sandman and reimagining other comic works.
His diverse fiction includes notable works like Neverwhere, Good Omens, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions and American Gods, with the latter earning multiple prestigious awards.
His foray into the film industry includes projects like Neverwhere, MirrorMask, Beowulf and a stop-motion adaptation of his young adult novel Coraline.
Gaiman’s frequent collaborations with visual artists Dave McKean and Charles Vess have also yielded standout works.
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His prolific career is decorated with awards, including the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book and multiple accolades for Coraline and The Sandman series, demonstrating his unique talent and popularity.
Below are some of the best quotes by Neil Gaiman.
Inspirational Neil Gaiman Quotes
1. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
2. “That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
3. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
4. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
5. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
6. “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
7. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
8. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
9. “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
10. “If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
11. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
12. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
13. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you’re doing something.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
14. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
15. “You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
16. “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!” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
17. “Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
18. “There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
19. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
20. “You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
Popular Neil Gaiman Quotes
21. “She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
22. “A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
23. “Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
24. “Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
25. “I hope that this year, you make mistakes. If you do, then it means you have tried, learned, lived, pushed yourself, changed you and your world, and most importantly, you’ve done something.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
26. “Let’s start a new tomorrow, today.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
27. “Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
28. “You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
29. “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
30. “Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
31. “Libraries really are the gates to the future.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
32. “What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
33. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
34. “Libraries are our friends.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
35. “And so there is magic.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
Top Neil Gaiman Quotes
36. “One word after another. That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
37. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
38. “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
39. “If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
40. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
41. “I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
42. “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
43. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
44. “You’re always you, and that doesn’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
45. “My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
46. “Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
47. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
48. “Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
49. “Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
50. “Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
Famous Neil Gaiman Quotes
51. “Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
52. “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
53. “Remember that, 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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
54. “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
55. “I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
56. “Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
57. “The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
58. “Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
59. “The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
60. “You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
61. “I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
62. “The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
63. “Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
64. “You hurt. It’s okay. I hurt too. Hold my hand.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
65. “You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
66. “It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
67. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
68. “Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
69. “Stories are the things that allow us to persuade each other that we’re human.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
70. “You mustn’t be afraid of the dark.’ ‘I’m not,’ said Shadow. ‘I’m afraid of the people in the dark.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
71. “It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
72. “Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
73. “I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
74. “Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
75. “Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
76. “Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
77. “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
78. “Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
79. “You were her way here, and it’s a dangerous thing to be a door.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
80. “Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
81. “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
82. “Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
83. “Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
Short Neil Gaiman Quotes
84. “I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
85. “Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
86. “Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes…” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
87. “Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
88. “I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
89. “Anyone who calls you “little lady” has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
90. “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
91. “Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
92. “I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
93. “Biting’s excellent. It’s like kissing – only there is a winner.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
94. “Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
95. “I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
96. “You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
97. “You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
98. “Death is the second oldest of the Endless. It’s hard not to love her. She loves you, after all.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
99. “Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
100. “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.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
Best Neil Gaiman Quotes
101. “The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
102. “He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
103. “He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
104. “I don’t know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I’ve eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than ‘Pass the salt’ or ‘If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?’” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
105. “Every hour wounds. The last one kills.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
106. “Remember your name. Do not lose hope – what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
107. “If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.” ~ (Neil Gaiman).
