Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman turns the boilerplate legal disclaimer into a sly pact with the reader: yes, this is fiction, but don’t get too comfortable policing the borders between “made up” and “real.” The sentence starts with the familiar publishing ritual - the safety rail that keeps authors out of court and readers in a stable, realist frame. Then it swerves, politely, into superstition. By granting an exception for “certain of the fairy folk,” he revives the oldest trick of folklore: treat the unseen with a careful courtesy, because disbelief can be its own kind of provocation.

The subtext is less “faeries exist” than “imagination has consequences.” Gaiman’s work lives in the overlap between myth and modernity, where stories aren’t decorative; they’re infrastructures for fear, desire, and identity. The parenthetical wiggle - “Or lack thereof” - is the punchline and the thesis. It mocks the pretense of certainty on both sides: the rationalist who insists there’s nothing there, and the believer who claims firm knowledge of what must remain ambiguous. That little phrase performs what it describes, making absence feel as charged as presence.

Context matters: Gaiman writes in a late-20th/early-21st-century culture that treats myth as content, endlessly remixable. He pushes back with a wink, suggesting that these older narratives demand respect, not because they’re literally true, but because they still bite. The joke lands because it’s also a warning: stories don’t need to be factual to be dangerous.