“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”
— Neil Gaiman
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Nobody’s ever going to see your first draft. That’s the thing you might be agonising over, but whatever you’re doing can be fixed. You can fix it tomorrow, you can fix it next week.”
— Neil Gaiman
“The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.”
— Neil Gaiman
“I feel that ideas are balloons. If I don’t catch them someone else will.”
— Neil Gaiman @neil-gaiman
“You’ll never write a perfect story. That’s okay. No stories are perfect. They still have the power to speak to us.”
— Neil Gaiman
“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.”
— Neil Gaiman
“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
— Neil Gaiman on freelancing (via writingdotcoffee)
(via writingdotcoffee)
“Trust your story.”
— Neil Gaiman (via psliterary)
(via shortstoryz)
“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.”
— Neil Gaiman (via brandx)
(via scribbledwriting)
“Finish things. Just whatever it takes to finish. Finish; and then get on with the next one. You will learn more from a glorious failure, then you ever will from something that you’ve never finished.”
— Neil Gaiman
“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
— Neil Gaiman on freelancing