Neil Gaiman Quotes

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they're not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people's lives than just truth. I can't stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

Real’ is a dirty word in this place.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

The moment the light went out, everyone stopped pretending.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

We create the illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. And when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.

Waking up in TRUTH is so much better than living in a lie.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

Why would anybody lie? The truth is always more colourful.

The world cannot be successfully fooled for all time.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

We dream — it is good we are dreaming — It would hurt us — were we awake — But since it is playing — kill us, And we are playing — shriek — What harm? Men die — externally — It is a truth — of Blood — But we — are dying in Drama — And Drama — is never dead — Cautious — We jar each other — And either — open the eyes — Lest the Phantasm — prove the Mistake — And the livid Surprise Cool us to Shafts of Granite — With just an Age — and Name — And perhaps a phrase in Egyptian — It's prudenter — to dream —

Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.

Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody's living that. Not just somebody, there's a lot of people.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

The world makes liars of us all.

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

You can't write your life story and leave out one of the most important things that happened to you in your life. I think that that would be dishonest, and it would be something people would be very angry about.