Do you want to collaborate on it, or do you want to sell it to me?' And I said, 'I'll collaborate, please.'' One day I got this phone call from Terry, saying 'Remember that plot? I know what happens next. NG: 'I didn't know what happened next, so I put it aside and I showed it to Terry. TP: 'Neil wrote several thousand words a couple of years ago, which was part of the main plot of Good Omens.' So how did the collaboration on Good Omens begin? Everyone liked that line, and you pinched it.'' I spotted it in a shop and said, 'You bastard! You pinched my sentence. TP: 'In fact, people that have read a lot of the 'Discworld' books and a lot of the 'Sandman' comics will actually find, for example, Neil put into one of the 'Sandman' comics a phrase lifted out of a 'Discworld' book. NG: 'There's a level on which we seem to share a communal undermind, in terms of what we've read, what we bring to it.' I don't think either of us has that particular bit of magic, if that's what it is, that the other guy puts into the work, but in terms of understanding the mechanisms of how you do it, I think we do.'

TP: 'I have to say there's a rider there. NG: '- we're the only people we know who could even attempt it.' He wouldn't do a good 'Discworld' book and I wouldn't do a good 'Sandman' comic, but -' Neil could write a 'Discworld' book, I could do a 'Sandman' comic.

TP: 'Both of us are prepared to admit the other guy could tackle our subject. NG: 'They're the wrong way 'round on the English edition.' They're the wrong way 'round on the American edition -' TP: 'Probably the most significant change which you must have noticed is the names get the other way 'round. NG: 'We both have egos the size of planetary cores.' TP: 'That isn't how we did it, mainly because our egos were fighting one another the whole time, and we were trying to grab the best bits from one another.' NG: 'It wasn't, somebody writes a three-page synopsis, and then somebody else writes a whole novel and gets their name small on the bottom.' What it wasn't was a case of one guy getting 2/3 of the money and the other guy doing 3/4 of the work.' TP: 'I wrote all the words, and Neil assembled them into certain meaningful patterns.

NG: 'We're working on seeing how many smart-alec answers we can come up with when people ask us how we collaborated.' NG: 'And at that point, we just did the double act.' We could take over the interview, since we knew he didn't know enough to stop us.' Terry Pratchett: 'Once we realized, it was great fun. He thought he'd been given two kooks who'd come across these old prophecies and were predicting that the world was going to be ending.' After a while, we twigged he hadn't realized this was fiction. Neil Gaiman: 'The first radio interview we did in New York, the interviewer was asking us 'Who is Agnes Nutter? What is her history? Is Armageddon happening?' and so on and so forth.

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