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
It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.
Chantal is having a relationship with a sentence. Just one of those things. A chance meeting that grew into something important for the both of them.
It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.
Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.
If you cared enough about your characters, what happened to them was interesting... It's important to care about them. About who they are and what they do.. I don't really care whose side they are on, and they can be monstrous on the outside, or worse, on the inside, but you still have to want to spend time with them.
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.
You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.
Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.
You are time. Foul time, who steals the gold from a maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from a child's eyes. Dark time, who has stolen from every thing there ever was all the things that it held precious and divine... And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave.
When I started doing Sandman, I could look at a group of people lined up to get my autograph, and I knew who was my fan and who was somebody's mum there to get a signature. It doesn't work that way anymore. They're people. They're us. That's what they look like.
When you're 11, walking home from school through this strange little English landscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head ... well, now this is one of those 'I've never told anybody this before' things,
I think the First Amendment is probably the most important thing that you have in this country. And I'm always horrified at the cavalier way that you (Americans) treat it.
Writing a book is lonelier and slower than writing comics. The joy of comics is that you have somebody to talk to. What you're writing isn't what anybody reads, it's a letter to an artist. There's immediate gratification as you start getting feedback on it.
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.