Neil Gaiman Quotes

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

A good book is a good book. End of story.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I think that's a hallmark of a really good story that it has readers that it speaks to more than others.

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.