Neil Gaiman Quotes

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.

I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

If you really want to tell stories, do it and don't be dissuaded.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I don't ever want anything to come in the way of me truthfully telling a story.

I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.