He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.
It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.
I don’t like the word ‘allegorical’, I don’t like the word ‘symbolic’ – the word I really like is ‘mythic’, and people always think that means ‘full of lies’, whereas of course what it really means is ‘full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story’.