Neil Gaiman

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

"Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read."

"Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."

"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant."

"Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

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

"When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day."

"Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!"

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men."

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something."

"Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

"I really don't know what "I love you"means.I think it means "Don't leave me here alone."

"Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't."