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Neil Gaiman Quotes about Children

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Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

Children, Book, Reading

"Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming" by Neil Gaiman, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2013.

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?

Children, Thinking, Media

"American Gods". Book by Neil Gaiman, 2001.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Children, Adults, Stories

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane". Book by Neil Gaiman, 2013.

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.

Children, Disappointment, Father

Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

Children, Parenting, Age

Neil Gaiman (2009). “Anansi Boys”, p.7, Harper Collins

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

Children, Kids, Parent

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Children, Names, Mountain

Neil Gaiman (2005). “Anansi Boys”

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Children, Bored, Simplicity

"American Gods". Book by Neil Gaiman, books.google.ru. November 10, 2011.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Dream, Children, Ocean

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

Children, Selfish, Rocks

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain by Mr. Neil Gaiman, scrivener, and then doodled, elaborated upon, illustrated, and beaten soundly by Mr. Cris Grimly, etcher and illuminator, featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastiness, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

Children, Two, Numbers

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Children, Reading, Tired

Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.14, HarperCollins

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Children, Space, Adults

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane". Book by Neil Gaiman, 2013.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

Children, Parent, Going Away

Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.20, HarperCollins

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

Wise, Children, Book

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Children, Clothes, Half

"The Sandman". Comic book series by Neil Gaiman, January 1989-March 1996.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.

Children, Adults, Use

Neil Gaiman (2013). “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”, p.103, Hachette UK

Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.

Children, Reading, Kids

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.

Children, Writing, Men

"Signal to Noise". Book by Neil Gaiman, 1992.

China was the most optimistic place I'd ever been. Everybody I met was pretty much convinced that their children would have it better than their parents had had it. It was like being in America in the 1950's, with this deep optimism about the future because everything was getting better, and that fascinated me.

Children, Optimistic, America

Source: collider.com

Picking one of your favorite creation or character is like picking the best one of your children! I'm not sure it really works. My very favorite characters tend to be ones I can go back to and look at, and have no idea how they popped out of my head.

Children, Character, Ideas

I don't think about age groups when I write, although I think if I know I'm writing for Children I'll be a bit more ambitious, and think more about every word, because I know that they pay closer attention when they read than adults do.

Children, Writing, Thinking

"National Book Festival: Novelist and Comics Author Neil Gaiman". The Washington Post Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. September 24, 2008.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

Children, Reading, Way

Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.22, Hachette UK

With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.

Children, Reading, Years

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Morning, Children, Adults

Neil Gaiman (2009). “Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions”, p.2, Harper Collins

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