"I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watching, and did not leave the reader or the viewer feeling cheated at the end."

"Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?"

"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."

"In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day."

"A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up."

"You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

"It's hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having."

"You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things."

"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."

"She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

"My mom used to say, 'Life isn't fair,'" said Shadow."Of course she did, said Wednesday. "It's one of those things that moms say, right up there with 'If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?'"You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks, said Shadow, doggedly. "It was the right thing to do.Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. "May your choices always be so clear, he said."

"And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that."

"I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

"I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?"

"Also, I've already won all the awards."

"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."

"That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know."

"A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change."

"Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed."

"Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't."

"Now me, said Mr. Vandemar."What number am I thinking of? "I beg your pardon? "What number am I thinking of? repeated Mr. Vandemar. "It's between one and a lot, he added, helpfully."

"They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?"

"There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably lost."

"A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world."

"Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"Neil Gaiman: "Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an au."

"How old are you?""About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did," Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, "And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."

"October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content."

"Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena."

"To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel."

"Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat's eyes, or an octopus's) are only made to see one version of reality at a time."

"Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight."

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters."

"If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained."

"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning."

"Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story."

"Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future..."

"Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose."

"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."

"Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative."

"People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before."

"I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get."

"His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master."

"Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return..."

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one."

"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 fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry."

"Neil Gaiman on librarians as knowledge navigators over time."And information was hard to find. And it was hard to find because it was like a flower growing in a desert " you had a long way to walk, but a librarian could take you to the flower. Now it's more like flowers growing in the Amazon jungle and you're trying to find a specific flower, Gaiman said. "Anyone who has spent 5 minutes Googling for information and just sees the amount of noise out there starts to realize that actually someone who knows what they're doing is incredibly useful. And librarians know what they're doing."

"Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.The two are rarely compatible."

"Once upon a time,' is code for 'I'm lying to you.' We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy-that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us."