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I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 10
Actor
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Science Fiction Writer
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Portchester
Hampshire
Neil Richard Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman
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Trying
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Ought
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More quotes by Neil Gaiman

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There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.
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The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.
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Go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
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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.
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You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.
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If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.
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I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.
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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.
Neil Gaiman
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Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
Neil Gaiman
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I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.
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I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.
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When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. It's all right we whisper, I'm here, I love you. and we lie: I'll never leave you. For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so
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I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.
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I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge. Oh yes, I can hear you. But I'm not coming out.
Neil Gaiman
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You know that I love you. And despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
Neil Gaiman
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This is the only country in the world, that worries about what it is. The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.
Neil Gaiman
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I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.
Neil Gaiman
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Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.
Neil Gaiman
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I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them--which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it.
Neil Gaiman
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May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.
Neil Gaiman