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Neil Gaiman turns 50 next year and he doesn't mind dying.

Not that the creator of some of the darkest, spookiest yarns in Western literature has a death wish. In fact, "there are a lot of stories I need to finish before the long night's done," he said when we sat down to talk this week in Toronto. "There are things nobody knows but me and I have to get them told."

Admittedly, he remembers "a couple of times in my life desperately wanting not to die." One, circa 1988, arose as he flew across the Atlantic with the finished art his friend Dave McKean had done for Black Orchid, Gaiman's first graphic novel for New York's DC Comics. "I was terrified that the flight would go down."

The second occurred in the mid-1990s "toward the end of The Sandman," Gaiman's most famous multi-part comic creation. "There was just this thing of, 'I have to not get hit by a car; I have to finish this story.' "

Now, Gaiman shrugs, having been a published writer for 25 years and earning fame, adulation ("The Premier Fantasist of His Generation!") and millions of dollars en route, "if I get hit tomorrow crossing the street, well … there is this body of work, isn't there?"

No kidding. In fact, it's hard to think of a more prolific and protean author in our time than Neil Richard Gaiman, who was born in Britain but has been a resident of Minneapolis for the past 17 years. For all the fearsomeness of much of his oeuvre, in person he's hardly the god of Hellfire. Questions — even ones that likely have been asked hundreds of times before — are answered articulately, with verve and wit, and they almost always include an eminently quotable quip. On the day of our chat, he'd been doing interviews since 6 a.m., having only flown in from Los Angeles hours earlier, yet the persona was never less than personable.

Name the idiom — comic, graphic novels, screenplays ( Beowulf, MirrorMask), short stories ( Fragile Things), biography ( Duran Duran: The First Four years of the Fab Five — Gaiman's first book), TV scripts, novels for adults ( American Gods), fiction for children, even poetry — and Gaiman has done 'em all and done them well. About the only lacuna in his curriculum vitae is an original musical and that's something he hopes to fill in the next two or three years. If not, "I'd be a little bit grumpy."

His latest success is The Graveyard Book, which captured the Newbery medal last week. The Pulitzer Prize of kids lit, it vaults Gaiman into the illustrious company of Hugh Lofting ( Doctor Dolittle), William Armstrong ( Sounder) , Katherine Paterson ( Jacob Have I Loved) and Kate DiCamillo ( The Tale of Despereaux).

Having written "a couple of decent children's books, I always figure that's your best chance at immortality," he observed. "Sure, American Gods [from 2001] was a big, huge, important 600-page novel and so on and so forth. But it is so much more likely in 100 years time," he laughed, "that somebody is going to be saying to somebody else, 'Hey, y'know I just discovered the guy who wrote The Graveyard Book, well, he wrote some other stuff, too.' "

Among some of that other stuff is Gaiman's bestselling children's novella from 2002, Coraline. A movie adaptation of that book opened in theatres yesterday, and though Gaiman had no direct involvement in the film — it's largely the work of director-writer-production designer Henry Selick, of James and the Giant Peach/ The Nightmare Before Christmas fame — he's so impressed with what's been done to it that he's putting his prestige behind it.

Coraline occupies a crucial place in the Gaiman oeuvre. For one thing, it's been translated into 30 languages, the most of any of his many books. For another, its story of a neglected nine-year-old girl, Coraline Jones, who finds a door into a world eerily similar to, yet better (initially at least) than her own, took him almost 10 years to finish — one of his all-time longest literary labours.

Gaiman, who's the father of one son (now 25) and two daughters (23, 14), claims to be happy growing older. With a sort of Pre-Raphaelite mouth anchoring a pair of arresting brown eyes topped by a mop of dark rock 'n' roll hair, the black-garbed Gaiman looks younger than his years. Yes, about a year ago, he "went through a phase … of being grumpy over lost youth, very grumpy that I was no longer young and pretty." This phase ended "about three weeks ago," he chuckled, when someone sent him a YouTube link of an appearance he'd done in 1992 on TVOntario's now-defunct Prisoners of Gravity.

Watching the clip "was so interesting because I thought, in my head, 'I'm 31, 32, these are my glory days.' But in reality I looked like something that hadn't yet been put into the oven. There are no lines, there is no character … I actually, suddenly, thought, 'I like my face now; it's better than the one I had.' And I like my opinions now. They're more interesting, they're based on more whereas, at age 30, I had Imposter Complex, this vague feeling that somehow I was just faking it."

Unsurprisingly, Gaiman claims never to have experienced writer's block. He credits his formidable persistence and drive to his early career as a journalist, cranking out copy for magazines like Penthouse, Knave, Time Out, Reflex and Shock Xpress. "Journalists are not allowed 'journalist block.' You don't get to light your incense-scented candle and have your special cup of tea in front of you before your copy gets written. Because you have to get something into a desk by three o'clock and if it's not there by three o'clock, there's the spectre of the blank page."

Postsecondary English departments used to snub him as mere scribbler of comics. Teachers thought his work was trash. "Now they teach me in schools. Now there is this minor cottage industry of people writing books — books, including teaching aids! — about Sandman and about the stuff that I've done."

Irony does have its pleasures.