Neil Gaiman

Is good friends with Tori Amos , who makes references to him on different songs of hers. He, in addition, has based the character "Foxglove", who appears in his comic books "Sandman" and "Death - the high cost of Living", on her.

Featured writer in "Born To Be Wild" comic book speaking out against animal cruelty.

Sandman won him the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for best writer (1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994), best continuing series (1991, 1992 and 1993), best graphic album-- reprint , and the Best New Graphic Album

The series also won the Harvey Award for best writer (1990, 1991) and best continuing series

Sandman #19 took the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story (making it the first comic ever to be awarded a literary award).

He is an honorary brother of the Phi Alpha Tau fraternity at Emerson College.

In 1992, he moved his family -- wife Mary, son Michael, and daughter Holly Gaiman -- to Minneapolis, Minnesota, from England.

He sued "Spawn" creator Todd McFarlane for violation of copyright and non-payment of royalties in January, 2002. The case went to court in October 2002, when the seven-person federal jury in Wisconsin took three days to decide in favor of Gaiman, agreeing that McFarlane used Gaimans created characters without permission or compensation. Gaiman was awarded $45,000 plus court costs.

Claims a new addiction to Calamansi Juice, a citrus fruit product of the Philippines, when he enjoyed many bottles of it while on a recent book tour of Asia, spending several days and nights in Manila.

His ex-wife Mary, an American, is four years older than Neil. He is engaged to Amanda Palmer.

Moved to Menomonie, Wisconsin, with his now ex-wife Mary, two daughters Holly and Maddy, and son Mike.

He has won 4 Stoker Awards from the Horror Fiction Writers of America (2003 for Sandman: Endless Nights, 2002 for Coraline, 2001 for American Gods, and 1999 for Sandman: The Dream Hunters). Hes been nominated for the Stokers for 4 other works of fiction as well.

The Hugo Awards are given at the World Science Fiction Convention and the winners are voted on by all attending members. Neil has won 3 Hugos (2004 for the short story "A Study in Emerald", 2003 for Coraline, and 2002 for American Gods).

The World Fantasy Awards are given at the World Fantasy Convention and the winners are voted on by all attending members. Neil has won once (1991 in the short fiction category for his comic book arc from Sandman called "A Midsummer Nights Dream). Hes been nominated for 6 additional works.

"Babylon 5" producer J. Michael Straczynski was so impressed with Gaimans writing, he named an alien race after him, the Gaim, who have a visual similarity to Gaimans "Sandman" character.

Is the son of David Bernard Gaiman, who was a Public Relations Director for the Church of Scientology in England (where it is not recognized as a religion) until his death in 2009.

January 15, 2010: Announced his engagement to Amanda Palmer , lead singer of The Dresden Dolls.

[January 2010] Engaged to The Dresden Dolls singer/pianist Amanda Palmer.

His family is Jewish (from Poland and Latvia). His last name is properly pronounced "gay-mun," not "guy-mun," as he says people often mispronounce it. Gaiman explains that it is an Anglicized version. The name was originally spelled "Haiman".

Friend of Lenny Henry.

Married fiance Amanda Palmer in New Orleans on November 10, 2010.

A huge fan of Harlan Ellison.

Lived in the US since 1989.

Is a huge fan of the TV series Supernatural.

Works frequently with artist Dave McKean.

A huge fan of author Gene Wolfe.

Some of his short stories take years to write and years to be published.

One of the most haunting tales hes ever read is Sweeney Todd.

Parts of his graphic novel Mr Punch are based on true events.

A huge fan of science-fiction, and is surprised he never became a SF author himself. He also covered a SF convention for a national newspaper in 1985.

A huge fan of writer, 17th century collector and historian John Aubrey.

Interviewed celebrities for Penthouse and Knave, two English magazines in the 1980s. He thought they were tamer than theyre US counterparts. He reflected that Penthouse had nothing to do with women and everything to do with pictures of women.

A huge fan and a close friend of Alan Moore.

Supports PETA.

Supports the comic book legal defense fund, an organization that defends the 1st Amendment rights of comic book creators, publishers and retailers.

Some of his work derives from his own nightmares.

Ray Bradburys short story Homecoming inspired Gaiman to become an author.

His interest in comic books came after reading some of Alan Moores work on Swamp Thing.

Did not attend college or University.

The novel Alice in Wonderland is an influence on Gaiman, e.g. he likens a crescent moon to a grin, like the Cheshire Cat in Gaimans novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. His work also seems inspired by the Brothers Grimm.

An acclaimed, award-winning author, hes won two national book awards and the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards.

His novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane won Book of the Year 2013 at the Specsavers National Book Awards.

He was nearly strangled as a 10-year old when a school bully pulled his tie so tight he had to have the other kids loosen it.

Gaiman has won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX and Locus awards for his writing.

In his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman has one of the characters say "spit-spot" from Mary Poppins . Hes a big fan of the books written by P.L. Travers.

Likes to write on the Isle of Skye.

Friends with Gary K. Wolf , Peter Straub , Henry Selick and Cornelia Funke.

A big fan of author C.S. Lewis. He read the entire Chronicles of Narnia after seeing "The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe" .

When he and Dave McKean collaborated on Mirrormask , McKean did the designs but they worked on the illustrated film script together.

His novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane derived from his own childhood experiences.

Has often collaborated with fellow author Terry Pratchett.

A fan of Ringo Starr.

Authors William Gibson and Philip Pullman are big fans of Gaiman.

When he was a child, he used to read on the branch of a Beech tree by climbing a rope ladder.

As well as film and TV, his work has been adapted for radio and graphic novels.

The works of the Brothers Grimm are an influence on Gaiman.

Son Anthony, with wife Amanda Palmer , born at 8:37 a.m. on September 16, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and,otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk,whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubt on their existence.

Or lack thereof.

The biggest difference between England and America is that England has,history, while America has geography.

In fiction, why do people never talk while making love?,One day the good and honest townsfolk of Northampton will burn Alan,(Moore) as a warlock, and it will be a great loss to the world.

I like writing things that will surprise me.

Writing is flying in dreams.

I laughed in the face of danger and spat on the shoes of writers block.

Handmade Christmas cards are things of beauty; monuments to inspired,creativity.

Every Christmas I feel insignificant and embarrassed and talentless.

The mechanics of writing fascinate me.

Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to,Newcastle. For coals.

Fantasy gets into your bones.

Science-fiction takes you across the stars, and into other times and,minds.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and,dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe,and still be back in time for dinner.

The hardest thing to do as a young writer is to finish something.

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. . .

George R R Martin is not your bitch.

There were apparently limits to what you could take out of South Africa.

[writing chunks from 1930s and 40s girls-school stories] I loved writing,them. I loved the fact that I got to make them up and could have just,made them up forever.

I think the joy of perfectly new experiences is that they should be a,surprise - and the joy of writing about kids is that so much is,absolutely new, you can give them first times for everything.

I remember my first ever experience with death - I must have been maybe,three. I remember thinking my goldfish bowl looked dirty, and very,proudly squirted some washing-up liquid in there just to help. And the,next day I came down and both of my goldfish were just floating on,their bodies, dead. And I was absolutely and utterly heartbroken.

There are things I think some kids are really good at. I was really good,at living inside books, the sort of relationship kids have with,fiction, the relationship kids have with books.

[why he likes giving lectures] To try and understand what I was writing,and who it was for.

I needed to change and fix and rebuild.

[photographs] Memory-jogging.

I owe thanks to so many people, the ones who were there in my life when,I needed them, the ones who brought me tea, the ones who wrote the,books that brought me up. To single any of them out is foolish.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just,writing every day. Words save our lives, sometimes.

I have wonderful editors on both sides of the Atlantic.

The good folk of Twitter were extremely helpful when I needed to,double-check how much Blackjacks and fruit salad sweets cost in the,1960s.

The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder,because nobody warns you about them.

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said. . . "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”. There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn’t know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial. I’m happier than I’ve been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I’ve made art I’m proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I’ve been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries. Sometimes I’ll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself. I miss friends who have died, but then, I’m glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?Ah, I’m rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I’m intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71. I wish the time hadn’t gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I’d enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

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.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.

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.

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.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.

Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

I am the only one of us who brings in any money. the other two cannot make money fortune telling. this is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. it is a bad thing and it troubles people, so they do not come back.

CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, 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.

Dreamlord?MORPHEUS: I am hope.

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes. “Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet. ” “Huh?” “ ‘Call no man happy until he is dead. ’ Herodotus. ” Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy. ” “The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done. ” “I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.

He told me that the phrase “the happiest days of your life” referred to your school days. This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children.

I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.

I am hope.

And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.

Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress. She smiled at him. “Hello, Bod,” she said. “Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name. ”“Names aren’t really important,” she said. “I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big. ”“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well. ”“Can I ride him?” asked Bod. “One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does. ”“Promise?”I promise.

Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.

I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear. Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?""Then what died? who are you mourning?""A point of view.

Charitably. . . I think. . . sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not. You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next. The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

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

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing. ) 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.

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.

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right. Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

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

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. ", University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)],The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

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.

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. . .

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?",Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won’t. You’ll already have made that art, and when they’re talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing. If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don’t read them. It’s not like you’ve signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion. Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they’ve made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It’s their call. You get on with making art.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.

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.

I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.

I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options.

You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the water hole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I’ll look after your balls for you. He was so proud of his balls. So he got into the water hole for a swim, and I put his balls on, and left him my own little spider balls. And then, you know what I did? I ran away, fast as my legs would take me “I didn’t stop till I got to the next town, And I saw Old Monkey there. You lookin’ mighty fine, Anansi, said Old Monkey. I said to him, You know what they all singin’ in the town over there? What are they singin’? he asks me. They singin’ the funniest song, I told him. Then I did a dance, and I sings, Tiger’s balls, yeah, I ate Tiger’s balls Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall ’Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials I ate Tiger’s balls. “Old Monkey he laughs fit to bust, holding his side and shakin’, and stampin’, then he starts singin’ Tiger’s balls, I ate Tiger’s balls, snappin’ his fingers, spinnin’ around on his two feet. That’s a fine song, he says, I’m goin’ to sing it to all my friends. You do that, I tell him, and I head back to the water hole. “There’s Tiger, down by the water hole, walkin’ up and down, with his tail switchin’ and swishin’ and his ears and the fur on his neck up as far as they can go, and he’s snappin’ at every insect comes by with his huge old saber teeth, and his eyes flashin’ orange fire. He looks mean and scary and big, but danglin’ between his legs, there’s the littlest balls in the littlest blackest most wrinkledy ball-sack you ever did see. “Hey, Anansi, he says, when he sees me. You were supposed to be guarding my balls while I went swimming. But when I got out of the swimming hole, there was nothing on the side of the bank but these little black shriveled-up good-for-nothing spider balls I’m wearing. “I done my best, I tells him, but it was those monkeys, they come by and eat your balls all up, and when I tell them off, then they pulled off my own little balls. And I was so ashamed I ran away. “You a liar, Anansi, says Tiger. I’m going to eat your liver. But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the water hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin’ down the path, clickin’ their fingers and singin’ as loud as they could sing, Tiger’s balls, yeah, I ate Tiger’s balls Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall ’Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials I ate Tiger’s balls. “And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he’s off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin’ between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin’ monkeys. So you all remember: just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you got no power.

Now me,” said Mr. Vandemar. “What number am I thinking of?” “I beg your pardon?” “What number am I thinking of?” repeated Mr. Vandemar. “It’s between one and a lot,” he added, helpfully.

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks. ),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.

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.

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

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.

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.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.

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.

I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes, I want you with me.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war. " It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.

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

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing. " Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.

I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

Because it is the nature of Dreams, and ONLY of Dreams, to define Reality. Destiny is bound to existence. Death is limited by what she will or will not accept.

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.

He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine 24 karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-bigtime territory.

You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

The dread had not left my soul.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Where does contagion end and art begin?,The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked…that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time. . .

He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.

I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.

Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.

Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.

There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months. The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.

She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

Yeah, you and me, we can ride on a starIf you stay with me, girlWe can rule the worldYeah, you and me, we can light up the skyIf you stay by my sideWe can rule the world,Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity. The heart is greater than a King, because a heart can know a King for what he is, and still love him. And once you give your heart, you cannot take it back.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving. I know a charm that will heal with a touch. I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy. I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks. A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it. A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender. A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it. An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship. A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore. For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again. An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes. A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers. A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle. A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them. A fifteenth: I had a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe in my dreams. A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman. A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another. And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one know but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably lost.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

enter the world of things as they are,Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.

The abbot cleared his throat. "You are all very stupid people," he told them graciously, "and you do not know anything at all.

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. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"MORPHEUS "I am hope.

Before that no one thought of us as colored-foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

She was the storm, she was the lightning. . .

Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

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.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.

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

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies. . .

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys. **Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you. ’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

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.

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.

You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.

. . . but fear of death gives us strength.

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

Everything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless. . . as everything created has an end.

Destiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

He is holding a book. Inside the book is the Universe.

I will write in words of fire. I will write them on your skin. I will write about desire. Write beginnings, write of sin. You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.

And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine. ) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.

If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

For as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth. . .

Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.

. . . Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.

There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly. . . But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar. . . Ask yourselves, all of you. . . What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?,I am not in my gallery and neither do I hold your sigil. Will you speak to me?,But we do not need to recount every sermon and eulogy. After all, you were there.

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.

Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.

In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.

Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.

Suffering is sometimes cleansing,” said the man. His clothes were casual, but expensive. “It can purify. "“It can also fuck you up,” said Shadow.

And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring them on. The god of the guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders. " He sighed.

And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders.

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Leave no path untaken.

Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.

I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love - drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.

[Dream] I do not want a grape. [Desire] I could make you want one.

Now go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.

Slowly gently night creeps up on you, more gentle than light, it helps you realize how much the light hinders you. In the darkness your senses learn when they should quit – in the embrace of the dark everything becomes what it really is. People fear the dark but unlike the light it does not lie to you. In the dark you can go where you long to be.

She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest.

The universe is amply supplied with night.

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.

Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness.

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois.

A book is a dream you hold in your hands,Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest, but I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea time serial. For a start, I became infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds only a foot step away. And another part of the meme was this- some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And perhaps some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside as well. And that was only the start of it.

Poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear form, filled with words that could wound with their beauty.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

Believe," said the rumbling voice. "If you are to survive, you must believe. ""Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth. "Everything," roared the buffalo man.

One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.

You know,” he said. “I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do. ” There was silence, in the high place.

Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.

She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knee his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattooed on his arm and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored the hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.

Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future. . .

Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?,Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.

I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and I could not have told you why.

And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know. . .

You are almost never cool to your children.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Shadow was a couple of a hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger.

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood. ) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home. The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.

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

I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you,We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.

And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’“ said Shadow. “Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’”“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do. ”Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.

Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.

You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.

This book is the book you have just read. It’s done.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each. What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man. No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.

Without stories, we are incomplete.

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.

People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.

When I was a child, I pestered my elders for stories.

Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

- The myths are dead. The gods are dead. The ghosts and ghouls and phantoms are dead. There is only the State, and the People. - No, Monsieur Robespierre. There is much more than that.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply. . .

A grayeyard is not a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy. .

He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.

If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.

I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end.

• They’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and they’re so proud of themselves, and so puffed up from being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.

I think that there should have been some nice wumpires," said my sister, wistfully. "Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires. ""There were not," said my father.

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.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.

I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.

But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.

I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress ofcorpses.

Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?""Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie. "Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return.

I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time. And then it turned and I saw its face. . .

I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats,Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.

Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.

He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.

A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep. Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.

It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme (. . . )".

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave. ’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

Rosies mother was a highly strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries and feuds.

Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments.

I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.

Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

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

The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.

There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one. . .

Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?,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. ”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance. Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not.

Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.

Our word Tragedy comes from the Greek, tragos-ode: “The song of the goat. ” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you. Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’. There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.

I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud,He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have the obligation to use it as best as you can. Don’t you agree?,I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

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.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place. . . Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings.

Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face.

What," asked Mr Croup, "do you want?""What," asked the Marquis de Carabas, a little more rhetorically, "does anyone want?""Dead things," suggested Mr Vandemar. "Extra teeth.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

That’s the moon,’ I said. ‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not. ’‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.

Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return. . .

Only the Gods are real.

He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble. Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god.

Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return. . .

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.

Do not fear the ghosts in this house; theyare the least of your worries. Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,The creaks and footsteps in the night,their little tricks of hiding things,or moving them, I findendearing, not upsettling. It makes the placefeel so much more like a home. Inhabited.

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does . . . Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

As we write we summon little demons.

I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

There were ten tongues within one head, and one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. " "What does it mean?" "A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.

I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.

There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months. The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight — and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.

It is a sea of blood. We come from the sea, Tim; our blood is salt, and strange tides ebb and flow within us all.

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again. Not that year. Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold.

I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die. Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.

In Muspell, at the edge of the flame, where the mist burns into light, where the land ends, stood Surtr, who existed before the gods. He stands there now. . . It is said that at Ragnarok, which is the end of the world, and only then, Surtr will leave his station. He will go forth from Muspell with his flaming sword and burn the world with fire, and one by one the gods will fall before him.

If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” Liza tells Bod.

The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.

The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place.

Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found.

I like stories where women save themselves.

We have teeth and we have tailsWe have tails we have eyesWe were here before you fellWe will be here when you rise.

You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough.

Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative.

There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.

If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

Oh . . . My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.

After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place. . .

Books are really places, make no mistake about that.

The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.

The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman. . .

He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night.

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night.

Neil Gaiman on librarians as knowledge navigators over time. “And information was hard to find. And it was hard to find because it was like a flower growing in a desert – you had a long way to walk, but a librarian could take you to the flower. Now it’s more like flowers growing in the Amazon jungle and you’re trying to find a specific flower,” Gaiman said. “Anyone who has spent 5 minutes Googling for information and just sees the amount of noise out there starts to realize that actually someone who knows what they’re doing is incredibly useful. And librarians know what they’re doing.

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.