Neil Gaiman: “We’re working on seeing how many smart-alec answers we can come up with when people ask us how we collaborated.”

Terry Pratchett: “I wrote all the words, and Neil assembled them into certain meaningful patterns… What it wasn’t was a case of one guy getting 2/3 of the money and the other guy doing ¾ of the work.”

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.”

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: “We both have egos the size of planetary cores.”

TP: “Probably the most significant change which you must have noticed [between the British and American editions] is the names get the other way ‘round. They’re the wrong way ‘round on the American edition [where Gaiman is listed first] —”

NG: “They’re the wrong way ‘round on the English edition.”

TP: “Both of us are prepared to admit the other guy could tackle our subject. Neil could write a ‘Discworld’ book, I could do a ‘Sandman’ comic. He wouldn’t do a good ‘Discworld’ book and I wouldn’t do a good ‘Sandman’ comic, but —”

NG: “— we’re the only people we know who could even attempt it.”

TP: “I have to say there’s a rider there. 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.”

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.”