We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. - William Styron

It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

When At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published in 1965 there was revealed in stunning outline the fully realized work of a novelist writing at white heat and at the peak of his powers; [...] Peter is a poet and a scientist, and the mingling of these two personae has given us such carefully observed, unsentimental, yet lyrically echoing works as The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, The Tree where Man was Born and The Snow Leopard. [...] We behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility.