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"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."

"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."

"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
Explore more quotes by Neil Gaiman

"Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question."

"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."

"Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city."

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."

"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, n MORE importantly, YOU're doing something."

"He couldn't see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn't. And there was never an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."

"We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries."
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