Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it.

For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even start crying, which would have been much, much worse.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.