01c. 1960 ADFiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
02c. 1960 ADFiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our livesNeil Gaiman / quote ↗
03c. 1960 ADNobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
04c. 1960 ADThings need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
05c. 1960 ADThe magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
06c. 1960 ADFiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
07c. 1960 ADThis is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
08c. 1960 ADLife is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
09c. 1960 ADI had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
10c. 1960 ADYou aren't allowed out of the graveyard -it's aren't, by the way, not amn't, not these days-because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
11c. 1960 ADYou’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
13c. 1960 AD~I hope that in this year to come, YOU make mistakes. Because if YOU are making mistakes, then YOU are making NEW things, trying NEW things, learning, living, pushing YOURself, changing YOURself, changing YOUR world. YOU're doing things YOU've never done before, n MORE importantly, YOU're doing something~Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
14c. 1960 ADYou get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
15c. 1960 ADBut between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
16c. 1960 ADYou're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
17c. 1960 ADEverything created has a beginning, Destiny of the Endless...as everything created has an end.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
18c. 1960 ADDestiny sees things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. He knows there are no stories, only the illusion of stories: threads and patterns that seem to appear in the pages of existence given meaning and significance by the observer. Destiny observes worlds and molecules like motes of dust hanging in a sunbeam: every movement, every moment inevitable. Destiny walks the paths of his garden, a place of forks and paths which combine and part, seeing only what is. He is surprised by nothing. There is nothing that can surprise him, nothing that was not already written in his book.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
21c. 1960 ADWalk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
22c. 1960 ADAnd when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
23c. 1960 ADI’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
24c. 1960 ADSometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
