Neil Gaiman Quotes

Characters can stay with you.

If there is a blues song, it just goes in one ear and out the other. But other than that, if it stays with you and when we are all 90, we're going to look back at those songs, and it's going to be emotional. And when someone plays it, and you know it, and you're going to go, "I know that song and I love it."

I love that you can watch a film and 10 years later still be affected.

So something about that touched me, obviously, when I was young and it just stayed with me. I'm always amazed by that, because my experience seems to be so much different than what I'm told, so much of the time.

Ultimately, Lloyd Alexander's tales of Prydain were enough to make me come back and visit again and again, and each time, I laughed and I wept. Each time. No exceptions.

I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.

The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I think only the movies you do remember are the films you had an emotional connection to.

I think that's what 'Stranger Things' does, it opens you up - it has a real beating heart to it.

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

The stories we love best do live in us forever.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

People will never forget how you made them feel.

. . .There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. . . Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

Steve Sanders lives on in our hearts and in our minds.

It's very difficult to explain the effect the first blues record I heard had on me, except to say that I recognized it immediately. It was as if I were being reintroduced to something that I already knew, maybe from another, earlier life. For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.

I really think one of the greatest allies you can have is the imagination of your audience.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.