I have been writing since I was 11 and love reading books. And I did have the good fortune of being published. Books can certainly inspire. My major literary influences: F. Scott Fitzgerald; Arthur C. Clarke; Sir Thomas Malory; Charles Baudelaire; Henry David Thoreau; Dante Alighieri; J.R.R. Tolkien; James Herriot; Elsie Homelund Minark; T.H. White; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Guillaume de Lorris; la poesie de Verlaine et les bon mots medieveaux et renaissance; la literattura italiano degli artisti come Gallileo ed anche Michelangelo; Arthur Miller; Barbara Tuchman; and many, many others.