Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 2

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

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.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

So 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.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.

If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.

But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.