"Have you ever had to watch The Disney Channel, and the kind of plots that are deemed acceptable on that channel? Let me give you an example: Somebody thinks that everybody’s forgotten their birthday, but they haven’t, because they were planning a surprise party all along! And everybody loves everybody, and then they hug. It’s almost like pornography [everybody laughs]. It presents this vision of an impossibly hospitable world which children know doesn’t exist."
— Neil Gaiman, discussing
Coraline.
Coraline."All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world; our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end."
"I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited. I spent that time learning what I could about adults. I was extremely interested in how they saw children and childhood. There was a copy of a play on my parents’ bookshelf. The play was called The Happiest Days of Your Life by John Dighton. It was about a girls’ school mistakenly evacuated to a boys’ school during the Second World War, and hilarity ensued. My father had played the school porter in an amateur production. He told me that the phrase “the happiest days of your life” referred to your schooldays. This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, as confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children."
— Neil Gaiman, talking about childhoood
"I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night. The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good."
—Trigger Warning introduction Part V., "About The Content of This Book"
