Neil Gaiman Quotes - Page 8

Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist - books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.

I was going to the library, too. I'd get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me by making me take sandwiches. I was absolutely fine given the prospect of a day spent with books and not eating.

Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world.

Some people never have them at all... I get them two or three times a week.

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow.
“In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,” said Crawly. “I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying ‘Don’t Touch’ in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere - it doesn’t all get used up at once.”
“I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.

And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?

I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared.

...but fear of death gives us strength.

Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now.

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives