Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 November 1960
CityPortchester, England
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.
Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.
Fiction 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 lives.
Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.
Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.
As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.
Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.
It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.
All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.