Neil Gaiman Writing Quotations

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

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.

I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'

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.

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.

A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.

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.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

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.

I was a voracious reader and I could never understand why comics were of any less merit or importance than any other way of writing. I think the thing that keeps me with comics is there's still so much to be done. There's still this huge unplowed field, this huge unexplored wilderness, and as long as I can keep doing new things and coming up with new things, I will.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.

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

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.

I don't think about age groups when I write, although I think if I know I'm writing for Children I'll be a bit more ambitious, and think more about every word, because I know that they pay closer attention when they read than adults do.

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.

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.

The secret to writing is just to write. Write every day. Never stop writing. Write on every surface you see; write on people on the street. When the cops come to arrest you, write on the cops. Write on the police car. Write on the judge. I'm in jail forever now, and the prison cell walls are completely covered with my writing, and I keep writing on the writing I wrote. That's my method.

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 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.

One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

I learned to write by writing.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.

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.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.

Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

The cartoon me writes the books cartoon people read in the cartoon world, because they need things to read there too.

I like 'pencil-necked weasel'. It has 'pencil' in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like 'intellectual' may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.

To be a good writer... read a lot and write every day.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that's still my agenda.

Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

I wish I could Buy Time - just write a cheque, and a few days later a brown cardboard box would arrive at the door containing three months (along with an extra bonus sunny weekend for being a good customer).

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, and children...Where nobody dies...In my worlds people died. And I thought I was being honest. I thought I was being honest.

On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.

I love writing in longhand. Writing in longhand, I think, is a marvelous thing to do for a writer these days. If you have a notebook and a nice pen you can go off somewhere, you can write that's solar powered. You can drop it or get it wet and pretty much all of your work will continue to be there. If you suddenly decide to look up a word or check a reference you will not look up four hours later, blinking, finding yourself somehow in the middle of an Ebay auction you never had any plans to be part of.

Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to Newcastle. For coals.

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right. Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you're waiting for someone to publish the first thing...

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 university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.

I have never written a musical. I have never written a weird, interactive piece of theater. I wanted to do something that would be disturbing. It will be disturbing theater with songs. There will be no people on wires. That's probably the next one of those things on my bucket list of things that I need to write before I get hit by that car.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I'd get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I'd love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn't taste of anything else.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

The biggest pitfall to avoid is not writing. Not writing is really, really easy to do, especially if you're a young writer. The hope that elves will come in the night and finish it for you, is a very common one to have. That is my main recommendation - you have to write, and you have to finish what you write and beyond that, it's all detail.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

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

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

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

I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.

The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic: There is whoever is writing it, and whoever is drawing it, and then there's whoever is reading it, because the really important things in comics are occurring in the panel gutters, they're occurring between panels as the person reading the comics is moving you through, is creating a film in their heads.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

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.

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

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