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

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
— Neil Gaiman

"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)

"[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... "
— Neil Gaiman

"I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time."
— Neil Gaiman

"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."
— 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

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

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

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. "
— Neil Gaiman (The Books of Magic)

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

"‘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)

"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)

"An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
— Neil Gaiman

"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

"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)

"It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"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

"We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable."
— Neil Gaiman

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

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

"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit."
— Neil Gaiman (M Is for Magic)

"I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?"
— Neil Gaiman (A Study in Emerald)

"Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy."
— Neil Gaiman

"Whither thou goest..."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"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

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

"Dreams are hopes, and echoes of hope."
— Neil Gaiman

"Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"...gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives."
— Neil Gaiman

"Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore."
— Neil Gaiman

" But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it? "
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"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)

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

"I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped."
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"…and soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra."
— Neil Gaiman

"One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it."
— Neil Gaiman

""...nobody's seen Jesus in years.""
— Neil Gaiman

"A book is a dream that you hold in your hands."
— Neil Gaiman

"I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing."
— Neil Gaiman

"Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?"
— Neil Gaiman

""Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians." "
— Neil Gaiman

"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it. "
— Neil Gaiman

"Reputations: A lifetime to build, seconds to destroy. "
— Captain Shakespeare

"Mmm...murdered by pirates... heart torn out and eaten... meet Victoria...I can't quite decided which sounds more fun... "
— Yvaine