You have to love reading in order to be a good writer. Because writing doesn’t start with you. It doesn’t spring from nothing. It doesn’t start at zero. You have to be conscious that there is a tremendous tradition behind you, a tradition that goes way back to the Bible and Homer and whatever you wish — and Aztec myths. You have to see yourself as part of the chain of being, if you wish. You are part of a process of language and memory and imagination. To put it in a nutshell, I think that to create, you have to be conscious of tradition. But to keep the tradition alive, you have to create something new. That would be my formula.