Neil Gaiman

born 1960 · English author

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) is an English author of fantasy fiction, comics, and screenplays, best known for The Sandman, American Gods, Stardust, and the children’s novel Coraline (2002). He used the ‘dragons can be beaten’ line as that book’s epigraph, attributing it to G.K. Chesterton. Gaiman has since explained that he wrote his own paraphrase of a Chesterton passage intending to check the wording later, and forgot over the years that the words were his, not Chesterton’s.

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“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten”

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