Why do I write? Because I can't stop. But what were the strange motivations which made me write a first novel? I didn't believe it would be published, I knew nothing about the writing world, nobody paid me and I spent a year working on it. Only a fool would write an unpublished novel expecting to make money or fame from it. There is a form of love in those innocent months when you first start to put a novel together. The one thousand other books I admired are what made me want to go on and I suppose a certain romance about the writer's life. Yet I believed there was as much chance of me becoming a successful novelist as there was of me becoming a famous astronaut! I hoped so much, a novel I wrote might be able to arouse the wonderful feelings other books which I loved, had created in me.