Comics Authors

"I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well that explains a lot about the DC Universe.""

"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."

"Look, I'm sorry it's over too. But good things have to end, stories have to end. It's what gives them meaning."

"Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own."

"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."

"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."

""So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him."

"Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

"Where are the Velvets?"

"Get me Neil on the line. No, I can't hold. Have him read 'Snow, Glass, Apples' where nothing is what it seems."

"Seems I keep getting this story twisted so, where's Neil when you need him?"

"But will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?"

"If you need me, me and Neil will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says 'hi', by the way..."

"I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into."

"Julia Hobsbawm OBE was a 22-year-old book publicist when in 1986 she was with Gaiman, then 25, at her studio flat in Chalk Farm, London. Hobsbawm said: "I literally have no memory of how he came to be back there. What I'm totally certain about is that romance was not on the cards, not for me. And I did not believe it was on the cards for him." In what Hobsbawm said was "an aggressive, unwanted pass", Gaiman "jumped" on her "out of the blue", forced his tongue into her mouth, and pushed her onto her sofa, before she wriggled free. Hobsbawm said she then cut off contact with Gaiman. She says she now wished she had called Gaiman out back then as she is plagued by the incident to this day and worries that she enabled his alleged misconduct to continue."

"I really like Neil a whole, whole, whole lot, and I really do not want to marry Kevin Smith, even a little. Do you remember the Trojan War, dude? I'm just saying. Can you imagine what a world war between a Neil Gaiman army and a Kevin Smith army would actually look like? Their fans are serious. I predict there would be lots of very high-fallutin', toilet-based name-calling, confusing many. And possibly foam swords swinging at hockey sticks. Actually, that's bullshit. There's no way anybody would leave their Twitter feeds for long enough to pull out a foam sword or a hockey stick. Maybe it'll be the world's first full-on digital war and people will just head over to Second Life to duke it out. I hope Neil's army wins."

"Nothing will remain of the armies of the living and of the dead, of the dreams of the gods and the bravery of their warriors, nothing but ash. Soon after, the swollen ocean will swallow the ashes as it washes across all the land, and everything living will be forgotten under the sunless sky. That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods."

"It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. You have failed."

"On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods.The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of the them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight."

"Even the gods cannot change destiny."

"I am grim of mind and wrathful of spirit and I have no desire to be nice to anyone."

"He said nothing: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes."

"“There are those who think it’s devil worship,” said Oliver. “And I think they are wrong. But then, one man’s god is another’s devil. Eh?”"

"“The old religion.” “Druids?” asked Shadow. He was uncertain what other old religions there were, in England. “Could be. Definitely could be. But I think it predates the druids. Doesn’t have much of a name. It’s just what people in these parts practice, beneath whatever else they believe. Druids, Norse, Catholics, Protestants, doesn’t matter. That’s what people pay lip service to. The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It’s well, well over two thousand years old. You don’t go mucking about with anything that powerful."

"“You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?” “I dabble,” she said. Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or the Tate Modern."

"Local gossip travels faster than light."

"But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside."

"There’s no Hell to spite the sinners. There’s no Heaven for the blessed. God is not what you imagine."

"Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget."

"“Were you always like this?” “Like what?” “A madman. With a time machine.” “Oh, no. It took ages until I got the time machine.”"

"Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs."

"Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto."

"“See?” said the boy. There was that precocious amusement again; but all kids can be insufferable sometimes, when they think they know something you don’t. It’s probably good for them."

"“I suppose you must be looking forward to them sorting all this out,” he said. “Er. The Palestinian situation. The politics.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to Jerusalem,” she said. “The people come. The people believe. Then they kill each other, to prove that God loves them.” “Well,” he said. “How would you fix it?” She smiled her whitest smile. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think it would be best if it was bombed. If it was bombed back to a radioactive desert. Then who would want it? But then I think, they would come here and collect the radioactive dust that might contain atoms of the Dome of the Rock, or of the Temple, or a wall that Christ leaned against on his way to the Cross. People would fight over who owns a poisonous desert, if that desert was Jerusalem."

"“Come to Jerusalem and go mad,” said Morrison. “Not much of an advertising slogan.”"

"Jerusalem, thought Morrison, was like a deep pool, where time had settled too thickly."

"I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle."

"In May I received an anonymous Mother’s Day card. This puzzled me. I would have noticed if I had ever had children, surely?"

"In my family “adventure” tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine.” Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “what she did that morning.” Going to the wrong part of a supermarket car park and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure."

"I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things."

"I thought about it. “Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city; there can be a hundred roads, a thousands paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.” Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, “You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”"

"She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at the palm of my right hand. She said, “I see death in your past and death in your future.” “Death waits in all our futures,” I said."

"I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good."

"Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking."

"Writers live in houses other people built."

"He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that’s a positive thing rather than an absence of character."

"He was demonstrating to the world the writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic."

"I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them."

"We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?"

"What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk."