"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night."
— Steve Martin

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
— Woody Allen

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer."
— Woody Allen

"I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!"
— Russell Brand

"Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives)

"...You'll think this is a bit silly, but I'm a bit--well, I have a thing about birds."
"What, a phobia?"
"Sort of."
"Well, that's the common term for an irrational fear of birds."
"What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?"
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"'Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters."
— Neil Gaiman

"I think I ve got Fear down, but how do I take it all the way up to Terror?"
— Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

"‘Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’

Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘...Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly."
— Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

"I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?"
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"I don't think it would be fun to write after inhaling art fumes. (What are art fumes?) No, I just make stuff up. It's easier that way."
— Neil Gaiman

"When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/ talk to my budgie"; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have."
— Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett

"'Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.'"
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"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

"Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross."
— Neil Gaiman

"(When asked: But you have a very open relationship with your fans.) Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers."
— Neil Gaiman

"You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."
— Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

"Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly."
— Neil Gaiman

"Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...'"
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"“‘You know what my mum once said?’ said Rosie… ‘She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.’
‘And this means…?’
‘Well’, she said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’” "
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

""Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.""
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad..."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names."
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"'We...we could be friends.'

'We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.'"
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"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 (American Gods)

"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 (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."
— Neil Gaiman

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 8: Worlds' End)

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on."
— Marilyn Monroe

"I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy."
— Steve Martin

"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."
— Zadie Smith

"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. "
— Woody Allen

"I'm as pure as the driven slush."
— Tallulah Bankhead

"I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
— Woody Allen

"You told me you like my mouth.
You want to kiss me.

My mouth is a wound and you
want to kiss me.

But you're like
that: You want to go
leaping over cliffs--
you want to go
drinking poison
and then write pretty poems about it--
and all I want to do is
fuck you.

You want flowers and sonnets and us
to be together until the end of the world and I'd
just like a blow job, I'd just like
to be friends.
that's what I'd really like.
Something warm and snuggly like a friendship.
and to fuck you.

The flowers are going to die and the cliffs are
going to erode and we might as well go fuck
since we're going to anyway.
We'll fuck and fight and eat and drink and smoke and fuck and smoke and fuck and
get married

And in six months from now
we'll stop making the world stop
to fuck each other

and one year from now
I'll get fat and you'll go bald and
I'll take prozac and you'll take viagra
I'll get obsessed with my biological clock
and my career
and you'll get obsessed with your hairline
and your career

and two years from now
you'd rather watch reruns than fuck me
and I'd rather be drinking than fuck you
so we'll drink in separate bars and one night
someone who likes my mouth will buy me a drink
that drink will be attached to a hand
there will be a human holding that drink
the kind with ears

and I will tell whoever it is
all about you
and how we used to forget to eat when we were in bed for three days
and your ears will be burning across town
where you are telling whoever it is how I don't understand you

and two years from now, that girl with that drink
she will nod that yes that I am nodding at you tonight
that nod, that yes that means you're not coming home
because just for a second the world has gone away
because just for a second there's someone who understands you

and that night it will be her pretty mouth you want
and that night I will pass out at home, alone
with a bottle that reminds me of us
because it'll be empty
because it'll be gone
I will pass out waiting for you
to come
home
listening to country music--and I hate
country music--
but I'll be feeling tragic
it'll be the most romantic moment
I've ever had and
I'll be alone

and you'll be across town
with that girl who right now is in high school
and right now I just met you
and right now I think you should take me home and fuck me
because it only gets uglier from here
we only get uglier from here
so take me to the edge of that cliff you love
and pour me a shot of your silky poison
you can take this mouth
this wound you want
but you can't kiss
and make it
better."
— Daphne Gottlieb (Why Things Burn: Poems)

"You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes)