for more Neil Gaiman quotes:Click Here

1. American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I’m sure there are words that are simply in there ’cause I like them. I know I couldn’t justify each and every one of them.
2. I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I’ve written.
3. As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
4. 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.
5. It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
6. I’m never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
7. 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.
8. It’s a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it’s not something I find terribly important.
9. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
10. Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
11. It’s a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
12. The joy of doing ‘Sandman’ was doing a comic and telling people, ‘No, it has an end,’ at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you’d finished.
13. 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.
14. Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
15. I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.
16. Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
17. I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.
18. When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.
19. 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.
20. 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.