Neil Gaiman Quotes

I don't travel much; I just stay at home and imagine weird places.

Take a few minutes of every day to fantasize about how you would wander, travel, or explore if you could.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Even though you're growing up, you should never stop having fun.

For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot.

When I was a little kid, I loved imagining things. I'd go outside and put on a cape and just imagine I was somebody else.

Filmmaking is a great adventure. I'm as excited as a kid to be given tickets to fly suddenly to England, South Africa, America, everywhere. I'm still a 13-year-old kid, flying.

When I was in school, I used to look out the window and see the big red double-deck buses driving by. It just looked so free.

When you're around kids you can be a little kid yourself and pretend that life is magic and you don't have to be one of those sweaty people going to work every day.

Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I'd imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

I'd stare up at the sky and just dream a lot. Still do. I dreamed that I didn't belong here, that I was going to travel a lot.

To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

I have always been drawn to young characters and seeing big tapestries through the eyes of a child. It probably comes from being a father myself and having a young son and seeing the world through his eyes. I write stories that are sort of the exaggerated version of that.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

When I was little, I would close my eyes and put my finger on a page. Then in my mind, I would go to that place.

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.