Neil Gaiman

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• "Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, 'So this is how it feels,' and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own." ()
  • Source: "The Tempest," issue #75 of The Sandman, collected in The Wake
  • Notes: The speaker is William Shakespeare, looking back over his career as he finishes writing The Tempest.

• "It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."
  • Source The Sandman

GOOD OMENS (1990)

• God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Signal to Noise (1992)

• In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.

• We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

• The world is always ending, for someone.

• I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.

• Apocatastasis. What it means:
  1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
  2) Return to a previous condition
  3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
  Think about it.

• We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

Quotes about Neil Gaiman

Tori Amos