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.
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.
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.
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.