Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) British author

See also: The Sandman, The Books of Magic, American Gods and Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett)

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  • Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison -- is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
    • "Death Talks About Life"
  • 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 someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.
  • It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
  • Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, 'So this is how it feels,' and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.
    • "The Tempest," issue #75 of The Sandman (1996), collected in The Wake; The speaker is William Shakespeare, looking back over his career as he finishes writing The Tempest as one of two plays commissioned by Morpheus (aka Dream, aka The Sandman).
  • We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.
    • Coraline (2002)
  • "So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.
    • Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens


  • Fuck, I won a Hugo!
    • Start of his acceptance speech on winning a Hugo award for his novel American Gods (September 2002)
  • The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.
  • 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.
    • Essay at neilgaiman.com
  • I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing.… I've always loved the gutter.
    • Radio interview, Studio 360, broadcast 2005-10-02
    • in response to a question about the increasing critical acceptance of fantasy writing
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Signal to Noise (1992)

  • In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.
  • We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.
  • The world is always ending, for someone.
  • I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.
  • Apocatastasis. What it means:
    1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
    2) Return to a previous condition
    3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
    Think about it.
  • We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.
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  • What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore obviously thinks so too. Strangers in Paradise is a delightful new comic, and Terry Moore is a fun writer and a fine cartoonist.
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Quotes by others about Neil Gaiman

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Tori Amos

Singer Tori Amos makes regular references to Gaiman in her song lyrics; She was a fan of his, and they became friends, before she herself gained fame and acclaim. He reciprocates by creating characters based on her in his books, crediting her as the source of some of Delirium's lines.

  • "If you need me, Neil and me will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says 'hi', by the way..." ("Tear in Your Hand")
  • "But will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?" ("Horses")
  • "Seems I keep getting this story twisted. So where's Neil when you need him?" ("Space Dog")
  • "Get me Neil on the line. No, I can't hold. Have him read 'Snow Glass Apples' where nothing is what it seems." ("Carbon")
  • "Where are the Velvets?" ("Hotel") (reference to the life essence vampires in "Neverwhere")
  • Gaiman has also been tributed by having a race of alien beings named after him on the television and book series "Babylon 5." "The Gaim" are a race of beings with long, fly-like faces remniscent of the mask worn by Gaiman's "Sandman" character.
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