Art & Creativity Quote by Neil Gaiman

"I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book"

Neil Gaiman, Author

About this Quote

Writing, for Neil Gaiman, is less mystic inspiration than obsessive carpentry. "I'll agonize over sentences" frames the line not as a confession of preciousness but as a professional ethic: the sentence is the unit where magic is manufactured. Gaiman tips his hand on craft when he says "specific effects". He’s talking about prose the way a filmmaker talks about lighting or a musician talks about reverb: you’re not merely conveying plot, you’re engineering a reader’s pulse. A sentence can lull, jab, seduce, misdirect; it can sound like a bedtime story or a legal warning. The agony is the price of that control.

The second half reveals what makes the task harder in a Gaiman book: "a number of different voices". This is a quiet flex and a practical problem. His fiction often toggles between registers - fairy tale and grit, innocence and menace, humor and dread - sometimes inside the same chapter. Multiple voices also implies moral plurality: different characters, different worldviews, different rhythms of thought. If each voice is real, the author can’t default to a single elegant style without flattening the cast.

The subtext is also about reader trust. When a writer can shift voices cleanly, the book feels inhabited rather than authored; the seams disappear. Gaiman’s line demystifies that illusion. The "agonize" isn’t self-pity, it’s an admission that the enchantment readers feel is built from repetition, revision, and an almost forensic attention to tone. In an era that rewards speed and output, he’s defending slowness as a narrative superpower.

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Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (born November 10, 1960) is a Author from United Kingdom.

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