"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."
— Hermann Hesse

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."
— Hermann Hesse

"In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke."
— Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)

"Love shouldn't beg and demand. Love must have the power to get confidence in itself. Only then it won't be attracted, but will attract."
— Hermann Hesse

"Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them."
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!"
— Hermann Hesse

"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."
— Hermann Hesse (Wer lieben kann ist glücklich. Über die Liebe.)

"'You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.'"
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. "
— Hermann Hesse

"When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane."
— Hermann Hesse

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

""Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke""
— Hermann Hesse

"My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal."
— Hermann Hesse (Narcissus and Goldmund)

"Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture."
— Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel)

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go"
— Hermann Hesse

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

"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)

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections)

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
— Neil Gaiman

"People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."
— Neil Gaiman

"I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept."
— Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere)

"Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue."
— Neil Gaiman

"Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all."
— Neil Gaiman

"The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush...
"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"
— Neil Gaiman

"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"Beware of Doors."
— Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere: A Novel)

"Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."
— Neil Gaiman

"A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way."
— Neil Gaiman

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"
"Stories. And they give me hope."
— Neil Gaiman (Marvel 1602)

"CHORONZON: I am a dire world, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.

MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.

CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.

MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.

CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.

MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy footed.

CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher, bacterium, warm-life destroying.

MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life nurturing.

CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.

MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embracing.

CHORONZON: I am Anti-Life, the Beast of Judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds... of everything. Sss. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?

MORPHEUS: I am hope. "
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes)

"The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure."
— Neil Gaiman

"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

"Even nothing cannot last forever."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"'What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.'"
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. "
— Neil Gaiman

"While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

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

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. -- G.K. Chesterton"
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

""Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.""
— Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

"Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you."
— John Scalzi

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind."
— Mahatma Gandhi (GANDHI: An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
— G.K. Chesterton

"God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh."
— Voltaire

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss