Neil Gaiman Quotes

Anybody who puts a book into someone else's hands inspires me - teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents.

The only question I'd be interested in is what books other celebrities have read recently, which is part of my campaign to promote reading.

Why buy a book when you can join a library.

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.

The City That Reads

The biggest kick is reading something new and exciting and then getting other people to share your enthusiasm. Beyond all the cant and hypocrisy in publishing, that's what it's all about.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

If you feel . . . that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

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.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over.

I think, oh my god, kids are reading, and they care about a book enough to come over and talk to me about a book that they care about. If I think about it as being a celebrity, it would freak me out. But I just think, lucky me, that I get to be a part of this whole thing.

I think I write for reluctant readers. Of course I want everyone to enjoy my books, but if the kids in the back row who normally don't pick up a book are engaged with what I'm writing, along with the kids who are big readers anyway, then I really feel like I've done my job.

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

We live for books.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Of all things I liked books best.

Teachers and librarians are some of my favorite people, especially since I was a teacher myself. I love talking to them because they have wonderful ideas about how to share books, and especially about how to share my books with kids.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.