Neil Gaiman

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."

"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."

"We owe it to each other to tell stories."

"But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)"

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

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

"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down."

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

"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 like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff."

"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!"

"Idris: Are all people like this?The Doctor: Like what?Idris: So much bigger on the inside."

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So 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."