Neil Gaiman

"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... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings."

"I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so."

"You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."

"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. Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’. There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can."

"Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

"Cats don’t have names,” it said.“No?” said Coraline.“No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance. Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won."

"I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time."

"A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people."

"If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself."

"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."

"Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found."

"People tend to find books when they are ready for them."

"But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit"

"Hell is something you carry with you."

"If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something."

"If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong."

"Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you."

"Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us."

"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 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."