Neil Gaiman Quotes

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.

Asking someone to describe what something sounds like is like telling a blind person to guess what I look like.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

What I may intend for a story to communicate and what a story ends up communicating could be two different things. And it could be an even more positive thing.

It's not what happened but how it is told.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.