The brilliant and slightly mad polymath Terence McKenna once said: half of the time you're thinking, you're actually listening.

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My books come out of a lifetime of listening as carefully as I could, and then setting down words when the time for that had come.

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I work hard on my books, striving for months and sometimes years to bring them towards what I consider to be perfection.

 

I hope they are good, I hope they are true, but one thing I feel sure of is that they are beautiful, so far as my own heart can judge. And that this particular kind of beauty should resonate with other hearts that also recognise beauty.

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I have written for many years but I take long breaks between books. I don't start anything unless the Muse tells me to do it, but once a book is begun I have to keep at it until it is perfected.

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My Literary apprenticeship was served under the guidance of various dead greats: Jeffers, Eliot, Cavafy, Seferis, Kerouac and the Beats, and a few other writers such as Tolkien. I also owe a great debt to Cormac McCarthy, and another kind of debt to the late David Foster Wallace.

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I remain convinced that the religious narratives of the world are faulty narratives, leading as they inevitably do towards hatred and bloodshed. And that we need to do better if the world is to be redeemed in any meaningful sense. And that this is an urgent project.

 

I remain convinced that the only thing a religion has - in fact the only thing a religion is - is a story. And to bring down any false religion you must produce a better story than they currently have. That makes it a simple project, albeit a very demanding one.

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The narratives in my books do not originate with me, but quod scripsi, scripsi.

 

Any errors in transcription, transcription or transliteration remain entirely my own.