Neil Gaiman Quotes

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.

[Books] may sleep for a while and be neglected; but whenever the desire of information springs up in the human breast, there they are with mild wisdom ready to instruct and please us.

Reading maketh a full man.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both."

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

Every time I read anything, whether it be a book, a script, or anything, I automatically imagine myself as the boy in the plot. I don't know why. Seriously, anything. If I'm reading a magazine article or whatever, I picture myself as the kid people are talking about. It's really weird. I don't know why I do that.

Keep reading books, stay in school. I encourage kids to read as much as they can, I challenge you to read a book every two weeks, like I try to.

Half my life is in book's written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Well, it's my age group, anywhere from, I'd say 30 to 70. The biggest comment I get about the book is how honest it is and that people can relate to my circumstances going across the line. Anybody could learn and deal with this book from reading it.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.

Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.

Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

That is the greatest gift my books have given me; what it means and has done for the kids.

Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.