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We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

— Neil Gaiman Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

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More quotes by Neil Gaiman

Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

January magazine interview (2002)

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

Jerusalem, thought Morrison, was like a deep pool, where time had settled too thickly.

Trigger Warning (2015)

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

The Graveyard Book (2008)

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

American Gods (2001)

All Neil Gaiman quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Neil Gaiman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.