I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

It’s trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it’s wrong to think that this means... there is some kind of uniform world culture.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

I was a precocious reader.

You can really do more than you think you can do.

Is anything accidental?