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My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I'm teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

When writing fantastical literature, your biggest problem is getting your audience to believe the fantastical elements of your story.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.