I don’t think I’m mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream. – Neil Gaiman
I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out. – Neil Gaiman
When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open. – Neil Gaiman
There’s 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 didn’t – and Jamaican stories. – Neil Gaiman
The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why. – Neil Gaiman
So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them. – Neil Gaiman
The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing ‘I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,’ was C.S. Lewis and the ‘Narnia’ books. – Neil Gaiman
The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography. – Neil Gaiman
I’ve been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We’d be writing blog entries like, ‘The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.’ – Neil Gaiman
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it. – Neil Gaiman
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
When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn’t do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn’t do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared. – Neil Gaiman
My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid. – 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. – Neil Gaiman
I’ll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you’re trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book. – Neil Gaiman
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. – Neil Gaiman
As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. – Neil Gaiman
A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up. – Neil Gaiman
When you’re starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that’s gone before and the stuff that’s influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that’s where you start from. – Neil Gaiman
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. – Neil Gaiman
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. – Neil Gaiman
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. – Neil Gaiman
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf ’cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf. – Neil Gaiman
I wish being a beekeeper, which I am, gave you a free pass on the carbon footprint, but it doesn’t. – Neil Gaiman
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. – Neil Gaiman
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. – Neil Gaiman
I’ve known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed. – Neil Gaiman
My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him. – Neil Gaiman