Neil Gaiman Stories Quotations

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell.

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

It goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.

The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.

She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones)

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

Stories are the things that allow us to persuade each other that we're human.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

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.

I think I love my dreaming process because one of the things that my dreaming process does is sort out stories for me.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?" "Stories. And they give me hope.

If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author.

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

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So 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.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.