Then, as so often happens with me, a story came into my head completely formed. It's one of the strange, almost magical aspects of my life as a writer that very often the first work of creation is done, as it were, "behind the scenes" of my conscious mind. Suddenly I will find myself waking in the middle of the night with something on my mind that needs to be written down very quickly before I forget it!
That was how it was with The Thief of Always. The story was in my head, all complete with characters and settings, without my really planning it. Even the first line of the novel--"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive"--was part of this strange midnight gift. And when I began to write this book from those hurried notes I'd taken in the state between waking and sleeping, the tale unfolded before my mind's eye like a movie. All I had to do was to describe what I was seeing.
I wish it were always so simple. I'd like to think that The Thief of Always was a story that was simply waiting somewhere in the air, waiting to be found and told, and I was the lucky man who was there to find it and write it.
So here it is, my dream-story. I hope that it comes to life in your imaginations as it first came to life in mine. And that the pleasure it gives you stays, after the dream is done.
--Clive Barker, introduction to The Thief of Always