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Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 10
Actor
Author
Beekeeper
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Comics Writer
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
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Science Fiction Writer
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Portchester
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Neil Richard Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman
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Books
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Victorian
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Generations
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Stop
Convinced
Uncool

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None of this is truly happening, he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. It's all in your head. Best not to think of it.
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One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.
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I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.
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The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. There are those, it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one - after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to esc
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I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?
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Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
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When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.
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I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who'd swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. 'Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.
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Leave no path untaken.
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So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.
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Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?
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The Doctor: Sorry, do you have a name? Idris: Seven hundred years and finally he asks. The Doctor: But what do I call you? Idris: I think you call me... Sexy? The Doctor: [embarrassed] Only when we're alone. Idris: We are alone. The Doctor: Oh. Come on then, Sexy.
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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.
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Actually I didn't shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he could tell I was extremely cross.
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Fear is contagious. You can catch it.
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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.
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In order for stories to work - for kids and for adults - they should scare. And you should triumph. There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary.
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As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.
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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
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I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.
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