Neil Gaiman Quotes

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

If you start eating with your mouth open - I can't stand it! I was out to dinner with a girl, and she started chomping on her food. You could see everything she was eating. I was like, 'So when do you want to go home?'

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.

I don't like people's table manners. That really puts you off eating food.

Smacking or chewing really loud and obnoxiously at dinner is a no-no. You know, if we're eating tacos, and I know we gotta use our hands, but if it gets all over your face, it's not sexy to me. That's not a good look.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

I hate when people eat food and talk with their mouth full. I always cover my mouth when I eat, but I've had it where there's little bologna bits flying on your food.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

I don't like talking to people I KNOW, but strangers, I have no problem with.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

I'm a writer. That's who I am, at my core. I'm a writer, and then I learned production and administration, along the way. I feel like most people can learn it because production and the administration part is all about logic, and it's all about learning rules and budgets.

I don't think there is enough respect in general for the time it takes to write consistently good fiction. Too many people think they will master writing overnight, or that they are as good as they will ever be.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

You’re disgusting when you eat,” Chuck said, sitting on the bench next to him. “It’s like watching a starving pig eat his own klunk.