Neil Gaiman: Smoke and Mirrors

I didn`t touch her. She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.

My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.

Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn`t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it`s a lie. Books don`t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you`d believe.