Neil Gaiman Quotes

At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

I have so many themes I want to explore, so many questions I'd like to raise and develop, and hopefully, I'll get to do just that.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Books come from within.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

That's the great thing about being a writer. You dream up amazing questions... and then dream up even more amazing answers.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

The seed of an idea laying dormant in an old sketchbook is fed the missing ingredient from a new experience. Trying to share some of these experiences, some of the wonders, is one of the reasons why I do books.

I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.

As I get on and films take four years to complete, I tend to have a hankering for very short projects so you can move on to the next idea. It's the ideas I'm interested in. What comes out of your head.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

The great thing about ideas is that every new idea leads to two more new ones. It’s the opposite of a gold rush, where the more people who show up in 1849 to get that gold in California, the faster the gold runs out. Ideas are not like that; ideas breed.

Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.