Neil Gaiman citáty

strana 2

„Někdy se vzbudíš. Někdy tě pád zabije. A někdy, když padáš, vzlétneš.“

„Pohádky jsou více než pravdivé – ne proto, že nám říkají, že existují draci, ale protože nám říkají, že je můžeme porazit.“

„Lidé si myslí, že sny nejsou skutečné, protože nejsou z látky, z částic. Sny jsou skutečné, ale skládají se z názorů, představ, vzpomínek, hříček a ztracených nadějí…“

„Dnes mě čeká smrt: je jako uzdravení, jako procházka v zahradě po nemoci.
Dnes mě čeká smrt: je jako vůně myrhy, jako posezení pod plachtou dobrého větru.
Dnes mě čeká smrt: je jako běh potůčku, jako návrat otroka z galejí.
Dnes mě čeká smrt: je jako domov, jejž člověk touží spatřit po rocích v zajetí.“

„Příběhy jsou svým způsobem také zrcadla. Odvádějí naši pozornost od věcí v temnotě.“

„Neodvážiš-li se ničeho, pak na konci dne nic bude vše, co jsi získal.“

„Zrcadla jsou úžasná věc. Zdá se, že nám říkají pravdu, že odrážejí život. Ale nastavte správně zrcadlo a ono vám bude lhát tak přesvědčivě, že uvěříte, že něco zmizelo.“

„"Tohle," ukázal jsem na vesmír. "K čemu to je?"
"K čemu? Ale vždyť to je vesmír."“

„Osud je často překvapením pro toho, komu je určen.“

“Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.
And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.”

“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."”

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”

“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”

“But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.”

“The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.”

““You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.””

“We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children… Where nobody dies… In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.”

“Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction … At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem.”

“The world is always ending, for someone.”

“Travers's Mary Poppins was a natural phenomena, ancient as mountain ranges, on first-name terms with the primal powers of the universe, adored and respected by everything that saw the world as it was. And she was a mystery. … philosophically, I suspect now, the universe of Mary Poppins underpins all my writing …”

“The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”

“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.”

“"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.”

“Chesterton was important — as important to me in his way as C. S. Lewis had been.
You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien’s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.”

“The little folk dare anything", said his friend. "And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too.”

“My grandpa sells condoms to sailors, He punctures the tips with a pin, My grandma does back-street abortions, My god how the money rolls in.”

“If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?”

“Off to bed. If squirrels take over in the night, I, for one, welcome our new bushy-tailed scampering overlords, & I know where the nuts are.”

“We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we'd written, and try to make the other one laugh. We'd plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We'd rewrite each other, footnote each other's pages, sometimes even footnote each other's footnotes.”

“Bod said, "I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused, and thought. "I want everything."”

“I wrote the first 5,000 words of William the Antichrist. It had a demon named Crawleigh. He drove a Citroen 2CV, and was ineffectual. Proper demons like Hastur and Ligur loathed him. It had a baby swap. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. Then my graphic novel Sandman happened, and it was almost a year later that the phone rang.
"It's Terry," said Terry. "'Ere. That thing you sent me. Are you doing anything with it?"
"Not really."
"Well, I think I know what happens next. Do you want to sell it to me? Or write it together?"
"Write it together," I said, because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michaelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him.”

“… the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.”

“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.”

“The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that…") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.”

“When I was very young, somebody — maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie — told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it … It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.”

“There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.”

“Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.”

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