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" I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing. "

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" When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open. "

Neil Gaiman

Kid

House

Way

" Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to. "

" When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader. "

" Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed. "

" The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in. "

" Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner. "

" 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. "

" I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out. "

" So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them. "

" I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' "

Neil Gaiman

Writing

Dinosaur

" Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus? "

" 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 Jamaican stories. "

Neil Gaiman

Myself

Jokes

" 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. "

" I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed. "

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

Neil Gaiman

People

Empathy

" I think of myself as a very lazy author. "

" We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable. "

" 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. "

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

" Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten. "

" 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. "

" I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect. "

" It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers. "

" I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book. "

" I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad. "

" I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction. "

Neil Gaiman

Science Fiction

Writing

" I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area. "

" American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them. "

" Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. "

" So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech. "