Neil Gaiman Quotes

To me there is a name for each person. I think it’s marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It’s either Gena or my mother or some other person.

Call me Ildar! Call me Abra-ca-da-bra! My name is my name.

My father is Emmit and my grandfather is Emmit, but I wanted something extra so I could separate my Emmitt from the rest of them. Even though on my birth certificate it has one T, I just added the extra T for me.

Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

I don't hold a grudge of sheer anger at life because of my name. No, no, no. It's something unique and cool. It's just a part of who I am. I'm OK with that.

Drip is me. That's my signature.

Your individuality is the most valuable thing you have.

Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

There are many more women who identify as unique people as well as mothers, or instead of as mothers, than there used to be and, hopefully, there are more men who identify as fathers.

I alone am different from the others, because I am nourished by the great mother.

Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

You can't try to be somebody you're not; that's not style.

People say to me, "When did you come out?" But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I'd found in an attic, saying, "I am a beautiful princess!" What my parents thought of this, I don't know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle ----- [expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win.

In fact almost everyone in my yearbook wrote the same thing to me: "To weird girl, you're nice." I didn't think it was bad. When I showed my mother she said, "Everyone is different." Being weird became my tool. I'm weird; that's who I am. It was my coping badge.

You cant reduce me to a set of influences.

You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

We did a book signing and people came up to me. There was an expectant mother who was like, "I think we might name our child Zach because of your work."

The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.

You know, you always want to just do your own thing - I mean some people want to be exactly like their parents - Ibut I wanted to do my own thing and I ended up doing a kind of mix of my mom and dad.