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.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and nonfiction. And even there, who can be sure?

Your dreams will betray you. Go nowhere on a horse that fades.

It gets cold in the desert at night, particularly up in the mountains; the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.

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

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