Quotes from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“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

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“BILL MURRAY, Cast Member: Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever. So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?” We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.