Almost every yogi that appeared in the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is either somebody I have seen and met and spoken to, or someone who is in my three degrees of separation - I know the source who talks to me about it so well that I believe his story.

What I'm trying to do right now is truly answer my most deepest most unarticulated questions for myself through my writing in some form.

When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.

What I do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.

My wife and I took a sabbatical and we went from Europe to India, where we lived in an ashram for six months and did meditation and yoga vigorously, like from 5:00 in the morning until 10:00 in the night in very austere circumstances. I think then my practice became less superficial, more like the traditional definition of what meditation was: to truly find oneness.