Neil Gaiman Art Quotations

This is the only country in the world," said Wednesday, into the stillness, "that worries about what it is." "What?" "The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.

I don't think it would be fun to write after inhaling art fumes. (What are art fumes?) No, I just make stuff up. It's easier that way.

I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.

Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue. (from "Instructions")

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

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.

Do the stuff only you can do. The urge starting out is to copy, and that's not a bad thing. Most of us find our voices only after we sound like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you: your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

I think you're doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You're growing a new heart, for a start.

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette... and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.

When things get tough, make good art.

I think you have to accept that an artist also has a relationship with his or her art and his or her fans: you are in an open relationship whether you like it or not. Give the artist room to go into the place they create (literally or metaphorically) . And love them when they can't remember where they put their keys.

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow.

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.

When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

My heart… It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it’s trying to escape because it doesn’t belong to me any more. It belongs to you.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight.

And weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

What about volcanoes?" "What about them?" "All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.

You know how is it when you love someone? And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There's always a piece of them in your heart.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.

He felt her heart beating against his chest. The moment began to transmute, and he wondered if there was something he should do. He wondered if he should kiss her. He wondered if he wanted to kiss her, and he realized that he truly didn't know.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

I am the most unhappy soul alive." "I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls." "Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

We have to get the... the thing I got... to the Angel. And then he'll tell Door about her family, and he'll tell me how to get home." Lamia looked at Hunter with delight. "And he can give you brains," she said, cheerfully, "and me a heart.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

Where does contagion end and art begin?

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.

When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. 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. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.

Go get your heart broken.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

I like comic conventions. I genuinely like comic conventions. I like wandering around from table to table; I like wandering up and down Artist's Alley and saying "Hello" to people. I like hanging out on the DC booth. I can't do that anymore. I'd like to, but I can't. I physically can't. If I stop moving, somebody will come up to me with something to sign, and if I sign it, somehow it's like ants sensing sugar. There will be fifty or a hundred people around me and then fire marshals will come and then I'm trapped in a crowd. It's bizarre.

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.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

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.

When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn’t it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob?

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

There are lots of artists in the world. But there's only one you. And the only person who has your point of view is you. If you decide not to make things, all you've done is deprive the world of all the stuff that only you could have brought to it.

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.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

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

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

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. (from 'Instructions')

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

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.

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.

There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.

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

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.

There may be a parallel between woodcuts and radio; radio plays are a living art form everywhere except the USA.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Writing a book is lonelier and slower than writing comics. The joy of comics is that you have somebody to talk to. What you're writing isn't what anybody reads, it's a letter to an artist. There's immediate gratification as you start getting feedback on it.

Somebody would say, 'Can you do us an article about big, bodice-ripping, blockbusting romance novels?' And I'd say, 'Yes, of course,' because I was a hungry young journalist.