Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible to, the essence of what it is, simply, to be.

If Baudelaire is correct, then in a sense childhood never ends, but exists in us not merely as a memory or complex of memories, but as an essential part of what we intrinsically are. Every artist knows the truth of this since, for the artist, childhood and the childhood conception of things is a deep source of what used to be called inspiration, if for no other reason than that it was as children that we first apprehended the world as mystery. The process of growing up is, sadly, a process of turning the mysterious into the mundane.

Some years ago I was asked to contribute to a collection of six-word "stories", along the lines of Hemingway's masterpiece - one of the best things he ever wrote: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." My contribution to the volume may seem facetious, but it contains a serious and bitter truth: "Should have lived more, written less."