Writing has always been a part of my life, even from the time I was a young boy. There were periods, some of them stretching to several years apiece, when I didn’t write a thing. But I always returned to the art. I read lots, too. Rarely fiction, mind you, but moral philosophy, education, history, religion, politics, economics. My favorites: Erich Fromm, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Lao-tse, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Billington, David C. Korten, E.F. Schumacher, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (my all-time favorite). I read the occasional science-fiction novel (Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert); I picked up my first fantasy book, The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, when I was 19 and working in a tiny gas-station booth and needing something to do with the long hours. But overwhelmingly nonfiction of the variety I listed above ruled my bookshelves and my thoughts, and does to this day.