Talk:Neil Gaiman

The bolded & italic words in the Shakespeare quote from "The Tempest" match the emphasized lettering as closely as possible. -- Scarequotes 04:35, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"Hate Love" removal is incorrect, please revert! This was "corrected" today based on Neil Gaiman's blog entry at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/06/what-she-said-they-said-he-said.html ... but what he said in the entry was that people were failing to specify that the quote was from a character (Rose Walker) rather than Neil's personal opinion. The version here was correctly attributed with character, and work (even issue number!), and the entry should be reverted to include the quote. --Gement 00:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I want to add the following quotation but would like someone with a print version of the book (I have the audio book) to source the page-chapter for me thanks.

COMING TO AMERICA 1778
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr Ibis in his perfect copper-plate handwriting.

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look -- here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers -- many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems to simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was some human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes: forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in the pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you would mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to up to a million'. With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, the flies that crawl in the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.

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.

A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: there was a girl, and her uncle sold her.

--Natezomby 05:47, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
 * See American Gods for most of the above quotes. ~ UDScott 13:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

American Gods
I will probably merge most of the quotes here to the American Gods page later, as well as doing more work on other Gaiman pages, but probably won't be back to do so for at least an hour. I hadn't thought of using Gaiman for QOTD today until a couple hours ago, and have not had enough time to do much right now. ~ Kalki 00:10, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Anansi Boys
Looks like it's time to split out Anansi Boys into its own page and have only selected quotes here. Since this has been done for American Gods and Stardust I don't expect any quibbles with the idea. However, stating my intent to do so in the next few days now so if there are any objections speak now or gripe at me later. -- Greyed 21:07, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * These should be provided with sources before being moved back into the article.


 * Give a man a fish, and he's creating art. But teach him to fish, and soon you'll have a pool full of exploding koi.

sources and reference for "Fuck! I got a Hugo!"
I'm more used to Wikipedia than Wikiquotes, so when I corrected this quote I put the references as footnotes with, in accordance with WP style. UDScott took out the References section and moved them into the text. But the list of cites stood out like a sore thumb there, at least to me, because it was the only such list on the page.

So I've moved the main one (Gaiman's blog) into the quote description. Since there's been disagreement over just what he said (for one thing, the page had it as "Fuck! I won a Hugo!"), I'm saving the others here: --Thnidu 16:09, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
 * entry on Neil Gaiman Message Board posted by "elora", 2002-09-02 6:02 pm. Accessed 2011-05-11
 * Comments by "xiphias" (2009-02-11 03:00 pm) and "stevendj" (2009-02-11 03:20 pm) in a blog post by James Nicoll. Accessed 2011-05-11