Neil Gaiman

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.”

“I'm English, and 'Doctor Who' was this thing that I've been watching since I was three.”

“'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.”

“What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'”

“Oh, tweeting prolifically is the most easy thing in the world. Tweeting prolifically is like somebody saying, 'Boy, you're a really good walker around,' you know. It's not really hard.”

“Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”

“I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and...”

“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.”

“With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic,...”

“I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.”

“There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jama...”

“The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.”

“I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the boo...”

“Make good art.”

“In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.”

“A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space....”

“In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dang...”

“As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's...”

“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 yours...”