Neil Gaiman

"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."

"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."

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

"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)"

"And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it."

"Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."

"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."

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

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

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