Neil Gaiman Zitate

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Kontext: We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Coraline (2002)

Quelle: Season of Mists (Údobí mlh) ze série Sandman

Kontext: Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together. I knew a lot of writers in London and many of them were award-winning writers and many of them were award-winning, respectable writers. And the trouble with being an award-winning, respectable writer is that you probably are not making a living.
If you write one well-reviewed, well-respected, not bad selling, but not a bestseller list book every three years, which you sell for a whopping 30,000 pounds, that's still going to average out to 10,000 pounds a year and you will make more managing a McDonald's. With overtime you'd probably make more working in a McDonald's. So there were incredibly well-respected, award-winning senior writers who, to make ends meet, were writing film novelizations and TV novelizations under pen names that they were desperately embarrassed about and didn't want anybody to know about.

January magazine interview (2002)

Dark Sonnet

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such,
although I liked a few folk pretty well.
Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch,
for brave men died and empires rose and fell.
For love, girls follow boys to foreign lands,
and men have followed women into hell.
In plays and poems someone understands,
there’s something makes us more than blood and bone.
And more than biological demands
for me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown.
I see the trees are bending where it’s been.
I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown.
I really don’t know what "I love you" means.
I think it means don’t leave me here alone...
Quelle: báseň Dark Sonnet z knihy Dark Adventures in the Dream Trade

Quelle: báseň Dark Sonnet z knihy Adventures in the Dream Trade

"Of Time, and Gully Foyle", Foreword to a 1999 edition of The Stars My Destination (1956)
Kontext: You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of their leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Kontext: You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this: The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Kontext: Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

Quelle: American Gods (2001), Ch. 3
Kontext: Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

William Shakespeare, portrayed as looking back over his career as he finishes writing The Tempest as one of two plays commissioned by Morpheus (aka Dream, aka The Sandman). "The Tempest," issue #75 of The Sandman (1996), collected in The Wake.
Kontext: Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own.

Coraline (2002)
Kontext: Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

The Sandman
Kontext: Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

Blurb on The Complete Strangers In Paradise (2004), Vol. 1

Neil Gaiman's Journal (01 December 2008)

Quelle: Coraline (2002)

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

Often misattributed to but inspired by GK Chesterton:
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Coraline (2002)

On how his interest in mythology started, in an interview with Bookslut (October 2006)

Quelle: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 4, “Mimir’s Head and Odin’s Eye” (p. 45)

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Quelle: The Graveyard Book (2008), Ch. 6

The Kate Bush Story (2014)

Fragile Things (2006)

Quelle: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 14, “The Death of Balder” (p. 234)

From Bitter Grounds
Fragile Things (2006)

"Mr. Wednesday" to Shadow, in Ch. 9
American Gods (2001)

From Inventing Aladdin
Fragile Things (2006)

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)