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Foreword

People say: What was it like writing Good Omens?

And we say: We were just a couple of guys, okay? We still are It was a su it, we split the ain We didn’t think it was important

And, in a way, it still isn’t Good Omens ritten by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them They weren’t even certain it would sell They certainly didn’t know they were going to write the ned a delightfully large nuone a worrying brown color, got repaired with sticky tape and string, and, in one case, consisted entirely of loose pages in a plastic bag On the other hand, there was the guy who’d had a special box ree, with the paperback nestling inside on black velvet There were silver runes on the lid We didn’t ask) Etiquette tip: It’s okay, ood manners to then nip around to the tattoo parlor next door and return half an hour later to show them the inflamed result

We didn’t knoe’d do soenerous standards, talking about humor in fifteen-second bursts in between newsflashes about the horrific hostage situation down at the local Burger King, being interviewed by an ill-prepared New York radio presenter who hadn’t got the e that Good Oetting a stern pre-interviearning about swearing from the diminutive Director of Protocol of a public-service radio station “because you English use bad language all the time”

In fact, neither of us swear much, especially not on the radio, but for the next hour we found ourselves auto in very short, carefully scanned sentences, while avoiding each other’s eyes

And then there were the readers, Gawd bless thened hundreds of thousands of copies for them by now The books are often well read to the point of physical disintegration; if

we run across a shiny new copy, it’s usually because the owner’s previous five have been stolen by friends, struck by lightning or eaten by giant termites in Sumatra You have been warned Oh, and we understand there’s a copy in the Vatican library It’d be nice to think so

It’s been fun And it continues

In the beginning

IT WAS A NICE DAY

All the days had been nice There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet But clouds ested that the first thunderstor one

The angel of the Eastern Gate put his wings over his head to shield himself from the first drops