35 Most Inspiring Neil Gaiman Quotes

Neil Gaiman is best known for his award-winning novels and comic books, one of which is (The Sandman). Gaiman grew up in a Polish-Jewish family who emigrated from Belgium to the UK in the early 1900s. Where his mom made a living as a pharmacist and his dad opened up several grocery store chains. To find Neil’s most popular books, click here.

Throughout life, Neil gained literary influence from some very famous authors. Some of which include: Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, C. S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In fact, he reached out and contacted R. A. Lafferty, a writer of science fiction whom Gaiman was quite fond of.

Neil is a busy man in today’s literary world. With his chameleon-like manner, Neil has millions of loyal followers on his Twitter account. Found to be quite witty, he’s a likable guy who everyone can relate to about various subjects in life.

So without further ado, here’s the 35 Most Inspiring Neil Gaiman Quotes for inward reflection.

Neil Gaiman Quotes

1. “The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked… that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” — Neil Gaiman

2. “I’ve been inspired by dreams – I’ve even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.” — Neil Gaiman

3. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” — Neil Gaiman

4. “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.” — Neil Gaiman

5. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.” — Neil Gaiman

6. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — Neil Gaiman

7. “You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.” — Neil Gaiman

8. “I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write. I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that the university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.” — Neil Gaiman

9. “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.” — Neil Gaiman

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10. “Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.” — Neil Gaiman

11. “You’re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.” — Neil Gaiman

12. “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.” — Neil Gaiman

13. “It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.” — Neil Gaiman

14. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.” — Neil Gaiman

15. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.” — Neil Gaiman

16. “You’re always you, and that doesn’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” — Neil Gaiman

17. “Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.” — Neil Gaiman

18. “I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.” — Neil Gaiman

19. “Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” — Neil Gaiman

20. “Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like – the 21st – century equivalents of Victorian improving literature – you’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.” — Neil Gaiman

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21. “I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.” — Neil Gaiman

22. “The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It’s a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.” — Neil Gaiman

23. “I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.” — Neil Gaiman

24. “Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.” — Neil Gaiman

25. “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole 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

26. “I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of the dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.” — Neil Gaiman

27. “I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.” — Neil Gaiman

28. “It’s a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it’s not something I find terribly important.” — Neil Gaiman

29. “I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.” — Neil Gaiman

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30. “We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don’t make it all bearable.” — Neil Gaiman

31. “I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.” — Neil Gaiman

32. “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.” — Neil Gaiman

33. “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.” — Neil Gaiman

34. “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.” — Neil Gaiman

35. “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 foolin’ a soul.” — Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman Video – 2012 Inspirational Commencement Speech at University of the Arts

This is an incredibly fun and inspirational speech. Everyone we’ve shared this with has really liked and especially if you are a creative person, you will LOVE this speech.

Summary

In honor of the New Year, we give you our favorite Neil Gaiman quote “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”!

This, along with the other quotes will guarantee you a bright future filled with inner peace and love.

 

Image Credit: nrkbeta, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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