Neil Gaiman Fiction Quotations

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

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

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

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

Most of what I want to try to do is continue to go places with fiction that I've never gone before, and tell stories I've never told before, and one of the problems you rapidly discover about fans is what fans want is the last thing they liked. They want more of that.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.

Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.

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.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

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.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.