Quotes by Neil Gaiman

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.

Theres a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didnt - and Jamaican stories.

“Nearly only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”

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

“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.”

“Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from ones lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

“If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but youll never be a novelist.”

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

“Its harder to pick and choose when youre dead. Its like a photograph, you know. It doesnt matter as much.”

“Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”

“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.”

“Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They dont ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isnt your own anymore.”

“Bod shrugged. So? he said. Its only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.”

“It doth not hurt, whispered a faint voice, She will take you life and all you are and all you carest for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. Shell take your joy. And one day youll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk youll be, a wisp youll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.”

“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.”

“They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. Youd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.”

“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.”

“Shes realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”

“If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. Theres a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”

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