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
Authors know that you should never really write a funny book because funny books do not get awards. Comic novels will not get awards.
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.
The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.
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.
In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.
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.
The joy of doing 'Sandman' was doing a comic and telling people, 'No, it has an end,' at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you'd finished.
One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.
I'm English, and 'Doctor Who' was this thing that I've been watching since I was three.
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.
What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'