To Absent Friends, Lost Loves,

For Love Is No Part Of The Dreamworld. Love Belongs To Desire, And Desire Is Always Cruel.

Television And Cinema Were All Very Well, But These Stories Happened To Other People. The Stories I Found In Books Happened Inside My Head. I Was, In Some Way, There. It's The Magic Of Fiction: You Take The Words And You Build Them Into Worlds.

She Really Was Pretty, For A Grown-up Person, But When You Are Seven, Beauty Is An Abstraction, Not An Imperative. I Wonder What I Would Have Done If She Had Smiled At Me Like That Now: Whether I Would Have Handed My Mind Or My Heart Or My Identify To Her For The Asking, As My Father Did.

Fiction Allows Us To Slide Into These Other Heads, These Other Places, And Look Out Through Other Eyes. And Then In The Tale We Stop Before We Die, Or We Die Vicariously And Unharmed, And In The World Beyond The Tale We Turn The Page Or Close The Book, And We Resume Our Lives.

The One Thing That You Have That Nobody Else Has Is You. Your Voice, Your Mind, Your Story, Your Vision. So Write And Draw And Build And Play And Dance And Live As Only You Can.