Neil Gaiman

I thought about it. “Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city; there can be a hundred roads, a thousands paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, “You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at the palm of my right hand.

She said, “I see death in your past and death in your future.”

“Death waits in all our futures,” I said.

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night.

The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbors need to do to be on the side of the good.

“Just go with it. It won’t hurt.”

I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.

I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.

I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.

Writers live in houses other people built.