I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

No one more cynical than an idealist.

I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.

I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.

It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.

We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.