Above all I measure the world with words. I have a pride in the craft, which is to say I aspire to be artistic, eloquent and truthful, even though the trade needs artifice, plain-speaking and self-opinion.

Aged eight I set out to write an autobiography. Beyond asserting that I was a writer I had, as one would expect, little more to add. Afterwards I came across a paragraph in Time magazine that foreshadowed real life. It was a first-hand account of a wildfire. The writer’s uninsured home had been razed to the ground. There was a photograph of him, back-turned, amidst the gutting of the previous evening. He quoted a Japanese poet:

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon

Great language sustains us. That’s what the man pared down to a seventeenth-century Edo period poem was saying. My primary school self couldn’t fully grasp the pathos, but I perceived its power.