Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 November 1960
CityPortchester, England
'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
You are time. Foul time, who steals the gold from a maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from a child's eyes. Dark time, who has stolen from every thing there ever was all the things that it held precious and divine... And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave.
As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.
A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.
Writing a book is lonelier and slower than writing comics. The joy of comics is that you have somebody to talk to. What you're writing isn't what anybody reads, it's a letter to an artist. There's immediate gratification as you start getting feedback on it.
When you're 11, walking home from school through this strange little English landscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head ... well, now this is one of those 'I've never told anybody this before' things,
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.