is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novel
s, audio theatre and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust
, American Gods
, Coraline
, and The Graveyard Book
. Gaiman's writing has won numerous awards, including Hugo
, Nebula
, and Bram Stoker
, as well as the 2009 Newbery Medal
and 2010 Carnegie Medal in Literature. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work.
Gaiman's family is of Polish and other Eastern European Jewish origins; his great-grandfather emigrated from Antwerp before 1914 and his grandfather eventually settled in the Hampshire
city of Portsmouth
and established a chain of grocery stores.
His father, David Bernard Gaiman
, worked in the same chain of stores; his mother, Sheila Gaiman (née Goldman), was a pharmacist.
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.
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.
Life — and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison — is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman_(comics)|Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well that explains a lot about the DC Universe."
We are small but we are many, we are many we are small; we were here before you rose, we will be here when you fall.