Once Upon A Time' Lasts

Gradually, At Various Points In Our Childhoods, We Discover Different Forms Of Conviction. There's The Rock-hard Certainty Of Personal Experience ("i Put My Finger In The Fire And It Hurt,"), Which Is Probably The Earliest Kind We Learn. Then There's The Logically Convincing, Which We Probably Come To First Through Maths, In The Context Of Pythagoras's Theorem Or Something Similar, And Which, If We First Encounter It At Exactly The Right Moment, Bursts On Our Minds Like Sunrise With The Whole Universe Playing A Great Chord Of C Major.

If There Is A War To Be Fought, We Don’t Consider Cost One Of The Factors In Deciding Whether Or Not To Fight.

When You Live For Many Hundreds Of Years, You Know That Every Opportunity Will Come Again.

A Story, To Me, Has A Particular Sprite, Like The Angel Of The Spirit Of That Story - And It's My Job To Attend To What It Wants To Do.

If You Want To Write Anything That Works, You Have To Go With The Grain Of Your Talent, Not Against It. If Your Talent Is Inert And Sullen In The Face Of Business Or Politics...but Takes Fire At The Thought Of Ghosts And Vampires And Witches And Demons Then Feed The Flames, Feed The Flames.