Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised,often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.

It is right here, all of it, here for the taking, right before our eyes - happiness, fulfillment, hope, peace, justice. And most of all, there is truth, ordinary and simple, just sitting there to be plucked, if only we get our lazy rear ends off the pillow of complacency. But first, we need to open our eyes to this banal fact. And for that we need a periodic bit of shakeup in the form of an infusion of wonder - fantastic literature.

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.

Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.

The desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate - so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.