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Sometimes Life Is Hard. Things Go Wrong—in Life And In Love And In Business And In Friendship And In Health And In All The Other Ways That Life Can Go Wrong. And When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. . . . Someone On The Internet Thinks What You’re Doing Is Stupid Or Evil Or It’s All Been Done Before: Make Good Art. Probably Things Will Work Out Somehow, Eventually Time Will Take The Sting Away, And It Doesn’t Even Matter. Do What Only You Can Do Best: Make Good Art.

-Neil Gaiman

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Sometimes Life Is Hard.

Neil Gaiman

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Sometimes Life Is Hard. Things Go Wrong—in Life And In Love And In Business And In Friendship And In Health And In All The Other Ways That Life Can Go Wrong. And When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. . . . Someone On The Internet Thinks What You’re Doing Is Stupid Or Evil Or It’s All Been Done Before: Make Good Art. Probably Things Will Work Out Somehow, Eventually Time Will Take The Sting Away, And It Doesn’t Even Matter. Do What Only You Can Do Best: Make Good Art.

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Most People Don't Realize How Important Librarians Are. I Ran Across A Book Recently Which Suggested That The Peace And Prosperity Of A Culture Was Solely Related To How Many Librarians It Contained. Possibly A Slight Overstatement. But A Culture That Doesn't Value Its Librarians Doesn't Value Ideas And Without Ideas, Well, Where Are We?

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Take One, And You Cannot Take The Other. But Neither Path Is Safe. Which Way Would You Walk — The Way Of Hard Truths Or The Way Of Fine Lies?

I Think That Is Something That I Always Like In My Work - The Sense Of Inclusion Rather Than The Sense Of Otherness.

There Was Nowhere They Could Have Gone And They Went There Anyway.

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I Finally Made Friends With My Father When I Entered My Twenties. We Had So Little In Common When I Was A Boy, And I Am Certain I Had Been A Disappointment To Him. He Did Not Ask For A Child With A Book, Off In Its Own World. He Wanted A Son Who Did What He Had Done; Swam And Boxed And Played Rugby, And Drove Cars At Speed With Abandon And Joy, But That Was Not What He Wound Up With.

I Don't Want Whatever I Want. Nobody Does. Not Really. What Kind Of Fun Would It Be If I Just Got Everything I Ever Wanted Just Like That, And It Didn't Mean Anything? What Then?

There's Nothing For Getting You Good Fast Like Having To Be Good Fast, If That Makes Any Sense.

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And I Thought, Eight Years Ago, When I Began Carefully Charting The Progress Of American Gods, Nervously Dipping My Toes Into The Waters Of Blogging, Would I Have Imagined A Future In Which, Instead Of Recording The Vicissitudes Of Bringing A Book Into The World, I Would Be Writing About Not-even-interestingly Missing Cups Of Cold Camomile Tea? And I Thought, Yup. Sounds About Right. Happy Eighth Birthday, Blog.

We Do Not Always Remember The Things That Do No Credit To Us. We Justify Them, Cover Them In Bright Lies Or With The Thick Dust Of Forgetfulness.

We Who Make Stories Know That We Tell Lies For A Living. But They Are Good Lies That Say True Things, And We Owe It To Our Readers To Build Them As Best We Can. Because Somewhere Out There Is Someone Who Needs That Story. Someone Who Will Grow Up With A Different Landscape, Who Without That Story Will Be A Different Person. And Who With That Story May Have Hope, Or Wisdom, Or Kindness, Or Comfort. And That Is Why We Write.

China Was The Most Optimistic Place I'd Ever Been. Everybody I Met Was Pretty Much Convinced That Their Children Would Have It Better Than Their Parents Had Had It. It Was Like Being In America In The 1950's, With This Deep Optimism About The Future Because Everything Was Getting Better, And That Fascinated Me.

My Bed Was Pushed Up Hard Against The Wall Just Below The Window. I Loved To Sleep With The Windows Open. Rainy Nights Were The Best Of All: I Would Open My Windows And Put My Head On My Pillow And Close My Eyes And Feel The Wind On My Face And Listen To The Trees Sway And Creak. There Would Be Raindrops Blown Onto My Face, Too, If I Was Lucky, And I Would Imagine That I Was In My Boat On The Ocean And That It Was Swaying With The Swell Of The Sea. I Did Not Imagine That I Was A Pirate, Or That I Was Going Anywhere. I Was Just On My Boat.

Too Soon, The Sun Will Rise.

The Search For The Word Gets No Easier But Nobody Else Is Going To Write Your Novel For You.

Sometimes We Can Choose The Paths We Follow. Sometimes Our Choices Are Made For Us. And Sometimes We Have No Choice At All.

We...we Could Be Friends.' We Could Be Rare Specimens Of An Exotic Breed Of Dancing African Elephants, But We're Not. At Least, I'm Not.

Short Stories Are Tiny Windows Into Other Worlds And Other Minds And Other Dreams

This Is A Work Of Fiction. Still, Given An Infinite Number Of Possible Worlds, It Must Be True On One Of Them. And If A Story Set In An Infinite Number Of Possible Worlds Is True In One Of Them, Then It Must Be True In All Of Them. So Maybe, It's Not As Fictional As We Think.

He Had Had A Severe Shock Some Weeks Earlier, When, Having Narrowly Failed To Capture A Large Grey-brown Hare For His Dinner, It Had Stopped At The Edge Of The Forest, Looked At Him With Disdain, And Said, 'well, I Hope You're Proud Of Yourself, That's All,' And Had Scampered Off Into The Long Grass

The Old Rules Are Crumbling And Nobody Knows What The New Rules Are...so Make Up Your Own Rules.

I Was Not Happy As A Child, Although From Time To Time I Was Content. I Lived In Books More Than I Lived Anywhere Else.

Like The Newspapers Used To Say, If The Truth Isn't Big Enough, You Print The Legend.

Nobody's Seen Jesus In Years.

She Smiled At Coraline, As If It Had Been A Very Long Time Since She Had Smiled And She Had Almost, But Not Quite, Forgotten How.

Actually I Didn't Shoot A Man In Reno Just To Watch Him Die, But He Could Tell I Was Extremely Cross.

You Think You're Being Given All Of These Things: Phones That Can Communicate With Other Devices, Car Service That's Better Than A Taxi, All Of These Amazing Things That Are Available To You At Any Time. It Isn't Until You've Swum Across The River That You Can Start To See The Negative Aspects Of It All.

You're Alive, Bod. That Means You Have Infinite Potential. You Can Do Anything, Make Anything, Dream Anything. If You Can Change The World, The World Will Change. Potential. Once You're Dead, It's Gone. Over. You've Made What You've Made, Dreamed Your Dream, Written Your Name. You May Be Buried Here, You May Even Walk. But That Potential Is Finished.

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Fear Is Contagious. You Can Catch It.

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You Made Peace,” Said The Buffalo Man. “you Took Our Words And Made Them Your Own. They Never Understood That They Were Here—and The People Who Worshiped Them Were Here—because It Suits Us That They Are Here. But We Can Change Our Minds. And Perhaps We Will.

First Rule Of Magic: Don't Let Anyone Know Your Real Name. Names Have Power.

The War Had Begun And Nobody Saw It. The Storm Was Lowering And Nobody Knew It.

We Build A Shell Around It, Like An Oyster Dealing With A Painful Particle Of Grit, Coating It With Smooth Pearl Layers In Order To Cope. This Is How We Walk And Talk And Function , Day In, Day Out. Immune To Others’ Pain And Loss.

If You Dare Nothing, Then When The Day Is Over, Nothing Is All You Will Have Gained.

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Charitably... I Think... Sometimes, Perhaps, One Must Change Or Die. And, In The End, There Were, Perhaps, Limits To How Much He Could Let Himself Change.

A Story Only Matters, I Suspect, To The Extent That The People In The Story Change.

It Seems To Me That One Of The Most Interesting Things About God As A Concept, If You Decide To Believe In God, Is That God's Ways Are Unknowable. And God Obviously, Look At The World Around You, Does Or Is Responsible For Some Terrible, Terrible, Awful Things. A Young Girl Kidnapped And Kept In The Darkness And Sexually Abused. The Deaths Of Six Million Jews. A Mudslide That Buries A Village. All Of These Things. If God Is Doing The Good Stuff, He's Got To Be Doing That Stuff Too.

Books Make Great Gifts Because They Have Whole Worlds Inside Of Them.

Set Your Fantasies In The Here And Now And Then, If Challenged, Claim To Be Writing Magical Realism.

As For Thinking Time Versus Writing Time, Well, That's Up To You. But - And I Wish It Were Otherwise - Books Don't Get Written By Thinking About Them, They Get Written By Writing Them. And That's When You Make Discoveries About What You're Writing. That's When You Get The Happy Accidents.

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Discontent Is A Good Thing: Discontented People Can Modify And Improve Their Worlds, Leave Them Better, Leave Them Different.

Rock And Roll Stars Have It Much Better Than Writers When They're On A Tour.

You Don't Have To Stay Anywhere Forever.

My Stuff Gets Published In Some Countries As Fiction And In Some Countries As Fantasy. It's Just Where They Think It Will Do Best In The Bookshops.

The Converse Held Reassuringly True: Daylight Was Safe. Daylight Was Always Safe.

Stories May Well Be Lies, But They Are Good Lies That Say True Things, And Which Can Sometimes Pay The Rent.

Nobody Will Ever Hurt Her. She’ll Just Smile Her Faint Vague Wonderful Smile And Walk Away.

Grown-ups Don't Look Like Grown-ups On The Inside Either. Outside, They're Big And Thoughtless And They Always Know What They're Doing. Inside, They Look Just Like They Always Have. Like They Did When They Were Your Age. Truth Is, There Aren't Any Grown-ups. Not One, In The Whole Wide World.

Let Us Begin This Letter, This Prelude To An Encounter, Formally, As A Declaration, In The Old-fashioned Way: I Love You. You Do Not Know Me (although You Have Seen Me, Smiled At Me). I Know You (although Not So Well As I Would Like. I Want To Be There When Your Eyes Flutter Open In The Morning, And You See Me, And You Smile. Surely This Would Be Paradise Enough?). So I Do Declare Myself To You Now, With Pen Set To Paper. I Declare It Again: I Love You.

But He Did Not Understand The Price. Mortals Never Do. They Only See The Prize, Their Heart's Desire, Their Dream... But The Price Of Getting What You Want, Is Getting What You Once Wanted.

Potentially Evil. Potentially Good, Too, I Suppose. Just This Huge Powerful Potentiality Waiting To Be Shaped.

Spiders' Webs Only Have To Be Large Enough To Catch Flies.

I'm Willing To Make A Fool Out Of Myself In Public. I'm Also Willing To Make Those Mistakes That You're Going To Make The First Time You Go Out, So Hopefully The Next Time It Will Be Better.

Anyone Who Calls You "little Lady" Has Already Excluded You From The Set Of People Worth Listening To.

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Empathy Is A Tool For Building People Into Groups, For Allowing Us To Function As More Than Self-obsessed Individuals.

On The Whole, Stories Don't Write Themselves.

Sometimes I Suspect That We Build Our Traps Ourselves, Then We Back Into Them, Pretending Amazement The While.

Adults Should Not Weep, I Knew. They Did Not Have Mothers Who Would Comfort Them.

[d]on't Ever Apologize To An Author For Buying Something In Paperback, Or Taking It Out From A Library (that's What They're There For. Use Your Library). Don't Apologize To This Author For Buying Books Second Hand, Or Getting Them From Bookcrossing Or Borrowing A Friend's Copy. What's Important To Me Is That People Read The Books And Enjoy Them, And That, At Some Point In There, The Book Was Bought By Someone. And That People Who Like Things, Tell Other People. The Most Important Thing Is That People Read.

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I Hope You'll Make Mistakes. If You're Making Mistakes, It Means You're Out There Doing Something.

The World Is Always Ending, For Someone.

When Things Get Tough... Make Good Art.

When Things Get Tough

The Boy Had The Towering Arrogance Only Seen In The Greatest Of Artists And All Nine-year-old Boys.

We Writers – And Especially Writers For Children, But All Writers – Have An Obligation To Our Readers: It's The Obligation To Write True Things, Especially Important When We Are Creating Tales Of People Who Do Not Exist In Places That Never Were – To Understand That Truth Is Not In What Happens But What It Tells Us About Who We Are. Fiction Is The Lie That Tells The Truth, After All.

I Loved All Books That I Could Read, And I Never Knew If I Was Ready For It Until I Tried To Read It, So I Tried To Read Everything.

Books Smell And Feel Better. They Have That Wonderful Thingness Of Turning The Pages.

People Pursue Things. As Soon As They Have Them They Run Away From Them.

Stories You Read When You're The Right Age Never Quite Leave You. You May Forget Who Wrote Them Or What The Story Was Called. Sometimes You'll Forget Precisely What Happened, But If A Story Touches You It Will Stay With You, Haunting The Places In Your Mind That You Rarely Ever Visit.

Songs Remain. They Last...a Song Can Last Long After The Events And The People In It Are Dust And Dreams And Gone. That's The Power Of Songs.

And I Would Try And Walk Far Enough Away That People Would Not Assume I Was With Him.

As A Journalist, I Would Talk To Writers, Directors, Creative People, And Discover That For An Awful Lot Of Them, The Moment They Became Successful, That Was All They Were Allowed To Do. So You End Up Talking To The Bestselling Science-fiction Author Who Wrote A Historical-fiction Novel That Everybody Loved, But No One Would Publish.

I Was The Kind Of Person Who Knew What He Wanted To Do; I Wanted To Write, I Wanted Not To Be In School, And I Felt That University Would Just Be Spending Another Four Years Of My Life Before I Could Write.

He Had Read Books, Newspapers And Magazines. He Knew That If You Ran Away You Sometimes Met Bad People Who Did Bad Things To You; But He Had Also Read Fairy Tales, So He Knew That There Were Kind People Out There, Side By Side With The Monsters.

I Love The Auditioning Process. I Love Working With The Technical Guys. I Absolutely Love The Editing Room. That Was Completely Fascinating To Me, Working With An Editor In Crafting The Thing Into Something You Had In Your Head.

If You Cared Enough About Your Characters, What Happened To Them Was Interesting... It's Important To Care About Them, About Who They Are And What They Do...i Don't Really Care Whose Side They Are On, And They Can Be Monstrous On The Outside Or, Worse, On The Inside, But You Still Have To Want To Spend Time With Them.

You Can Buy A Book New, Buy It In Hardback Or Wait For The Paperback, Find It Used Or As A Collectible. I Don't Mind. What I Care About Most Is That People Are Reading.

There Aren't Any Good Guys, And There Aren't Any Bad Guys. There's Just Us. People. Doing Our Best To Get By.

We Wrapped Our Dreams In Words And Patterned The Words So That They Would Live Forever, Unforgettable.

Short Stories Are Tiny Windows Into Other Worlds And Other Minds And Dreams. They Are Journeys You Can Make To The Far Side Of The Universe And Still Be Back In Time For Dinner.

There Are Little Pockets Of Old Time In London, Where Things And Places Stay The Same, Like Bubbles In Amber,” She Explained. “there’s A Lot Of Time In London, And It Has To Go Somewhere—it Doesn’t All Get Used Up At Once.” “i May Still Be Hung Over,” Sighed Richard. “that Almost Made Sense.

Science Is A Way Of Talking About The Universe In Words That Bind It To A Common Reality. Magic Is A Method Of Talking To The Universe In Words That It Cannot Ignore. The Two Are Rarely Compatible.

Sometimes Life Is Hard. Things Go Wrong—in Life And In Love And In Business And In Friendship And In Health And In All The Other Ways That Life Can Go Wrong. And When Things Get Tough, This Is What You Should Do: Make Good Art. . . . Someone On The Internet Thinks What You’re Doing Is Stupid Or Evil Or It’s All Been Done Before: Make Good Art. Probably Things Will Work Out Somehow, Eventually Time Will Take The Sting Away, And It Doesn’t Even Matter. Do What Only You Can Do Best: Make Good Art.

To Be Honest, I Think Love Is Complete Bullshit. I Don't Think Anyone Ever Loves Anyone. I Think The Best People Ever Get Is Horny; Horny And Scared, So When They Find Someone Who Makes Them Horny, And They Get Too Scared Of The World Outside, They Stay Together And They Call It Love.

She Had The Feeling That The Door Was Looking At Her, Which She Knew Was Silly, And Knew On A Deeper Level Was Somehow True.

Someone Killed My Mother And My Father And My Sister?" "yes, Someone Did." "a Man?" "a Man." "which Means," Said Bod, "you're Asking The Wrong Question." Silas Raised An Eyebrow. "how So?" "well," Said Bod. "if I Go Outside In The World, The Question Isn't Who Will Keep Me Safe From Him?" "no?" "no. It's Who Will Keep Him Safe From Me?

Only The Phoenix Rises And Does Not Descend. And Everything Changes. And Nothing Is Truly Lost.

I Was Always So Relieved That Anyone Wants To Publish Anything I've Written.

The Best Advice I Can Give On This Is, Once It's Done, To Put It Away Until You Can Read It With New Eyes. Finish The Short Story, Print It Out, Then Put It In A Drawer And Write Other Things. When You're Ready, Pick It Up And Read It, As If You've Never Read It Before. If There Are Things You Aren't Satisfied With As A Reader, Go In And Fix Them As A Writer: That's Revision.

Lucifer Protests He Was Never To Blame For Inducing Anyone To Sin, And That He’s Never Had An Interest In Owning Souls: 'they Die, And They Come Here – Having Transgressed Against What They Believed To Be Right – And Expect Us To Fulfill Their Desire For Pain And Retribution. I Don’t Make Them Come Here… I Need No Souls. And How Can Anyone Own A Soul? No, They Belong To Themselves. They Just Hate To Have To Face Up To It.

Reading Is Important. Books Are Important. Librarians Are Important. (also, Libraries Are Not Child-care Facilities, But Sometimes Feral Children Raise Themselves Among The Stacks.)

You Are An Analog Girl, Living In A Digital World.

I'll Find You. Don't Worry. Just Be On Your Own And I'll Find You.

People Seem To Think That They Can't Come Up With Ideas, And They're Wrong. They Can And They Do, But They Just Think Of It As Daydreaming, Or Wasting Time. Kids Get Told Not To Make Things Up, And In My Case, Nobody Told Me Long Enough, Or It Just Didn't Stick.

If You Do Not Value Libraries Then You Do Not Value Information Or Culture Or Wisdom. You Are Silencing The Voices Of The Past And You Are Damaging The Future.

The Young Woman Was Crying, In The Way That Grownups Cry, Keeping It Inside As Much As They Can, And Hating It When It Still Pushes Out At The Edges, Making Them Ugly And Funny-looking On The Way.

All Fiction Is A Process Of Imagining: Whatever You Write, In Whatever Genre Or Medium, Your Task Is To Make Things Up Convincingly And Interestingly And New.

A Book Is A Dream That You Hold In Your Hands.

I Was Bright, And I Could Use That As A Weapon: Words Can Wound, Whatever Those Sticks And Stones Sayings Claim About Them Never Hurting, And I Could Use Them If I Had To.

I Was A Reader. I Loved Reading. Reading Things Gave Me Pleasure. I Was Very Good At Most Subjects In School, Not Because I Had Any Particular Aptitude In Them, But Because Normally On The First Day Of School They'd Hand Out Schoolbooks, And I'd Read Them--which Would Mean That I'd Know What Was Coming Up, Because I'd Read It.

It Is Neither Fair Nor Unfair, Nobody Owens. It Simply Is

The World Always Seems Brighter When You've Just Made Something That Wasn't There Before.

The Imagination And The Place That Dreams Come From Is So Huge And So Important. I'm Trying To Write About The Real World, In That I'm Trying To Write About Whatever It Is The Experience That Makes Us Human, The Things That We Have In Common.

Diana Used To Tell Me She Had A Travel Jinx, Something I Only Really Started To Believe When The Plane Door Fell Off.

Dinner With Steven Moffat In Bar Shu, Spent Mostly In Enthusiastic Dr Who Neepery. I Love My Life....as A Side Note, Running Windows Vista On The Panasonic W7 Is Making Me Really Nostalgic For 1986. Whoever Thought I'd Get To Type Things Then Stare At A Blank Screen For A Bit And One-by-one Watch The Letters Appear? Cory And Mike's 'why Don't You Run Linux?' Talks Are Staring To Seem Much More Sensible.

Love Of My Life

Doing Fine, Thank You, I Would Say, Never Knowing How To Talk About What I Do. If I Could Talk About It, I Would Not Have To Do It. I Make Art, Sometimes I Make True Art, And Sometimes It Fills The Empty Places In My Heart. Some Of Them. Not All.

People Who Believe They'll Be Happy If They Go And Live Somewhere Else, Learn It Doesn't Work That Way. Wherever You Go, You Take Yourself With You.

You Musn’t Be Afraid Of The Dark.’ ‘i’m Not,’ Said Shadow. ‘i’m Afraid Of The People In The Dark.

Childhood Memories Are Sometimes Covered And Obscured Beneath The Things That Come Later, Like Childhood Toys Forgotten At The Bottom Of A Crammed Adult Closet, But They Are Never Lost For Good.

I Wish I Could Buy Time - Just Write A Cheque, And A Few Days Later A Brown Cardboard Box Would Arrive At The Door Containing Three Months (along With An Extra Bonus Sunny Weekend For Being A Good Customer).

Is The Chemical Aftertaste The Reason Why People Eat Hot Dogs, Or Is It Some Kind Of Bonus?

There's Never Been A True War That Wasn't Fought Between Two Sets Of People Who Were Certain They Were In The Right. The Really Dangerous People Believe They Are Doing Whatever They Are Doing Solely And Only Because It Is Without Question The Right Thing To Do. And That Is What Makes Them Dangerous.

He Was Alone In The Darkness Once More, But The Darkness Became Brighter And Brighter Until It Was Burning Like The Sun.

Trees There Were, Old As Trees Can Be, Huge And Grasping With Hearts Black As Sin. Strange Trees That Some Said Walked In The Night.

I'm Sure There's An Alternate Universe Where I Got To Become A Pulpy Science Fiction Writer.

Science Fiction

Fiction Writers

I Love Cgi If It's Invisible. I Don't Like It When It's There And Obvious.

Picking One Of Your Favorite Creation Or Character Is Like Picking The Best One Of Your Children! I'm Not Sure It Really Works. My Very Favorite Characters Tend To Be Ones I Can Go Back To And Look At, And Have No Idea How They Popped Out Of My Head.

And Sometimes When You Fall... You Fly...

Nobody Actually Looks Like What They Really Are On The Inside.

Words Can Wound, And Wounds Can Heal.

Go Get Your Heart Broken.

Genre Fiction, As Terry Pratchett Has Pointed Out, Is A Stew. You Take Stuff Out Of The Pot, You Put Stuff Back. The Stew Bubbles On.

It Is Good For Children To Find Themselves Facing The Elements Of A Fairy Tale - They Are Well-equipped To Deal With These

This Little Piggy Went To Hades This Little Piggy Stayed Home This Little Piggy Ate Raw And Steaming Human Flesh This Little Piggy Violated Virgins And This Little Piggy Clambered Over A Heap Of Dead Bodies To Get To The Top

I Mean, Maybe I Am Crazy. I Mean, Maybe. But If This Is All There Is, Then I Don't Want To Be Sane.

Every Hour Wounds. The Last One Kills.

I Believe That Mankind's Destiny Lies In The Stars.

What Would Be The Fun In Doing Things You Know Are Going To Work?

I Knew Enough About Adults To Know That If Did Tell Them What Had Happened, I Would Not Be Believed. Adults Rarely Seemed To Believe Me When I Told The Truth Anyway.

I Lay On The Bed And Lost Myself In Stories. I Liked That. Books Were Safer Than Other People Anyways.

I've Been Inspired By Dreams - I've Even Stolen Scenes Or Images Or Characters From Them.

With Pornography, If You Don't Get Hard Or Wet, Depending On Your Gender, It Didn't Work. With Humour, If You Don't Laugh It Didn't Work. And With Horror, If You Don't Get Scared Or Haunted, Depending On What It's Trying To Do, It Didn't Work. I'm Fascinated By Those Three Categories.

Fiction Gives Us Empathy: It Puts Us Inside The Minds Of Other People, Gives Us The Gifts Of Seeing The World Through Their Eyes. Fiction Is A Lie That Tells Us True Things, Over And Over.

Rain In The Graveyard, And The World Puddled Into Blurred Reflections.

If You Want To Imagine The Future, Imagine A Boy And His Dog And His Friends. And A Summer That Never Ends.

Richard Opened His Hand, And The Key Stared Up At Him From His Palm. "by My Crooked Teeth," Asked Richard, Remembering, "who Am I?

Now You People Have Names. That's Because You Don't Know Who You Are. We Know Who We Are, So We Don't Need Names.

The Best Thing About Doing A Signing Tour Is That Numbers Become Faces. I Got To Sign Books For Six Or Seven Thousand People, All Of Whom Were Dreadfully Nice. Everything Else, The Interviews, The Hotels, The Plane Travel, The Best-seller Lists, Even The Sushi, Gets Old Awfully Fast. Well, Maybe Not The Sushi.

I Fell For Her Like A Suicide From A Bridge.

Nothing’s Changed. You’ll Go Home. You’ll Be Bored. You’ll Be Ignored. No One Will Listen To You, Really Listen To You. You’re Too Clever And Too Quiet For Them To Understand. They Don’t Even Get Your Name Right.

You Wouldn't Die In Here, Nothing Ever Dies In Here, But If You Stayed Here For Too Long, After A While Just A Little Of You Would Exist Everywhere, All Spread Out. And That's Not A Good Thing. Never Enough Of You All Together In One Place, So T Here Wouldn't Be Anything Left That Would Think Of Itself As An 'i.' No Point Of View Any Longer, Because You'd Be An Infinite Sequence Of Views And Of Points.

There Was A Hysteria In There, Certainly, But There Was Also The Exhaustion Of Someone Who Had Managed, Somehow, To Believe Several Dozen Impossible Things In The Last Twenty-four Hours, Without Ever Getting A Proper Breakfast.

Impossible Things

It's Easy, There's A Trick To It, You Do It Or You Die.

I Am Amiable. Vague. Puzzled. Messy-haired.

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Richard Harris Barham

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