Neil Gaiman · 365 pages
Rating: (55.1K votes)
“When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“As we write we summon little demons.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“He died alone,' said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. 'It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“The converse held reassuringly true: daylight was safe. Daylight was always safe.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“I cross two fingers, a binary precaution against hex, effective as superconductor or simple superstition.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“If not for Death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with Death, well, their lives will have meaning.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Even in the pettiest, most unpromising material, she had discovered, you could find real treasures.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“I once made up a story as a wedding present for some friends. It was about a couple who were given a story as a wedding present. It was not a reassuring story. Having made up the story, I decided that they’d probably prefer a toaster, so I got them a toaster, and to this day have not written the story down.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“You want to know the future, love? Then wait:”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Inside the temple Richard found a life waiting for him, all ready to be worn and lived, and inside that life, another. Each life he tried on, he slipped into and it pulled him farther in, farther away from the world he came from; one by one, existence following existence, rivers of dreams and fields of stars, a hawk with a sparrow clutched in its talons flies low above the grass, and here are tiny intricate people waiting for him to fill their heads with life, and thousands of years pass and he is engaged in strange work of great importance and sharp beauty, and he is loved, and he is honored, and then a pull, a sharp tug, and it’s…”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“Dryware, wetware, hardware, software, blackware, darkware, nightware, nightmare . . . The modem sits inviting beside the phone, red eyes. I let it rest— you can’t trust anybody these days.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“This is the kind of thing that you wonder about when you make things up for a living. I remain unconvinced that it is the kind of activity that is a fit occupation for an adult, but it’s too late now: I seem to have a career that I enjoy which doesn’t involve getting up too early in the morning.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“He will sweep it up—everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of “Baywatch.” So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of “Baywatch” for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don’t give you grief over where you get your ideas from.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
Neil Gaiman
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“Era un día soleado de principios de verano, y se oía el canto de los pájaros. En un huerto cercano que hasta entonces se había librado de los bombardeos, los manzanos florecían de forma espectacular. El hombre era el único animal que acababa con la vida de los de su propia especie por millones y que convertía el paisaje en un terreno yermo, plagado de cráteres provocados por las bombas y alambradas de espino. Walter tuvo el pensamiento apocalíptico de que, tal vez, la humanidad se borraría a sí misma de la faz de la tierra y dejaría el mundo a los pájaros y a los árboles. Tal vez eso fuera lo mejor.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants
“Each manager sees his own division as the center of the world, and that’s as it should be. But someone has to have an overall view and decide what’s best for the company.”
― Sidney Sheldon, quote from Master of the Game
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from As You Like It
“Allan woke up and wondered whether it wouldn't soon be time to go to bed.”
― Jonas Jonasson, quote from The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
“War makes monsters of men, you once said to me Todd. Well, so does too much knowledge. Too much knowledge of your fellow man, too much knowledge of his weakness, his pathetic greed and vanity, and how laughably easy it is to control him.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Monsters of Men
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