Favorite Neil Gaiman Quotes

Dear Me,

Who is Neil Gaiman? When did you first learn about him?

I can't exactly recall what year I first heard the guy's name. I have this writer friend who kept on raving about the guy's creations. For me, Neil Gaiman = The Sandman comic series. Whenever his name is mentioned, I equate all his works to graphic novels & science fictions; which are not the type of reading materials I will bother picking out in a stack of books.

Well, I was utterly mistaken.

I had to check him out and discovered a lot of things helpful enough for me to like him and include his published books in my TBR pile. A lot of his writings had achieved recognitions and awards and the latest was this year's Newberry Medal for his novel, The Graveyard Book.

Anyway, I encountered some very nice and worthy lines from Neil Gaiman's writings.

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like 'Maybe we should just be friends' or 'How very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love." — Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)


"Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead." — Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)


"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe." — Neil Gaiman (The Sandman)


"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul." — Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

Do you have favorite quotes from any of his books? Care to share? :)