Quotes from Neil Gaiman

The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.

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.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

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

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 fooling a soul.

As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

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.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

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.

Libraries are our friends.

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 lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

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

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.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

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

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.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.