I have written as long as I can remember. Of course this would be what I do, imitating my parents, who were both freelance writers. I got published a couple of times in children's magazines, and turned into a young writer kind of smoothly afterwards. In 1974 the Writers' Union organized an event for young authors and a handful were selected for a seminar where real critics discussed our work. More importantly, this put us in touch with each other, and we started gathering as a group of young writers on Thursdays on the Union premises, but without any supervision - except that once we found a strange object that probably was a microphone in a sculpture that was watching us. Those were the days. Quite a number of us actually became involved with literature in one way or another afterwards. And a few collections appeared. At the time, I wrote stories mostly - short, abstract ones, with weird twists of reality. In one, the protagonist is raised from his bed at night by two Romans, who are looking for a fugitive slave. Poor sods, he thinks, time-travelling to our world, even our Gothic old town won't be much comfort for them. And, of course, he wakes up looking at the Colosseum. In another one, a heretic is hung for the denial of afterlife, and when the crowds have dispersed from his execution grounds, he quietly climbs down from the gallows and goes back to prison as usual.

What I write now is something very different. Words do not come lightly to me, and sometimes it takes a couple of days or even more to get a sentence right, so my books are not very long, but periods between them tend to be. And though I do believe that very good literature can come out of bold and angry, sometimes painful acts of writing that address the dark and sordid aspects of life, I also think that it takes another kind of courage to write so that it would help people in staying who they are. I heard that one person made a major career decision under the influence of one of my books, choosing what he liked instead of what was profitable, and this came to me as the highest possible praise.

I also have to confess that having read a lot, I cannot escape dialogue with my favourite authors in what I write myself. No one can, so we just have to live with it. I've always acknowledged those of my influences that I notice myself. "Little Things" has something akin with the jottings of medieval Japanese, "H&B" was consciously meant to be a socratic dialogue first and a novel only later, and "The Brother" is a lyrical spaghetti western. We'll see what comes next.