I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out , Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire

Music was part of the solution to my problem. It’s healing and soothing effect allowed me to see there was more to life than attempting suicide. Through my lyrics, I was able to voice out my problems,

I couldn’t wait to pursue my love of singing again. Music helped me through a lot in the hospital, and it seemed like I was far away from my troubles when I was singing or listening to music.

I've heard that before, from writers who say that I get them going again. It makes me feel that in my life I am at the source of life and words. I feel that I'm sort of standing over this hole in the universe, and it's all pouring in. I can be a conduit. The people who read my work feel more alive, and they can work. I feel like that about other writers that make me keep going. When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people. (1989)

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.

But these days in China the authorities don’t grant my novels official book licensing numbers, so there’s no way to publish them in China. For that reason, I’m considering writing in English again. I swim every day, and when I swim, I feel that swimming laps back and forth is rather boring, so I think about a novel’s structure, its beginning, its characters and such, and that way I enjoy swimming more. After I have swum for a few more months, maybe I can talk more concretely about my next project.

When I discovered writing, it was...like being dropped into water and finding that you're an excellent swimmer - that you love the water and you love to swim. I think when I discovered poetry it allowed me to step into my real life, my real self- the body, heart and soul of being alive.

He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced." p. 46

Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. [...] Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”

But that day there was a pen, I took it and started writing. After a while, a certain calm came over me, I felt better. Maybe that was a survival instinct.

Around that time, when the band was in Australia, I had a recurring voice problem and was advised to visit a doctor with a reputation for helping singers. The doctor had a sense that anxiety explained this constant sore throat rather than, as several of my nearest and dearest had suggested, the cheroots, the alcohol, and the talking into the small hours. It was in my interest to trust the good doctor, and because he also had such good references, I agreed to something I’d never previously agreed to. I allowed him to put me under hypnosis. Well, almost … “Imagine,” said the doctor, “a room with all your best memories around you. Be in the room. Now open the drawer. Find those memories. The best things that have ever happened to you. The affirmations. Your partner, your children, your best friends. A moment that changed your life’s direction. All the best things. Be in that room.

There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.

I started writing for the same reason I breathe-because I had to.