[on the beginnings of his writing career]: "For reasons unknown, I threw myself into writing plays that almost no one was performing. But my first book ever was actually a translation of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Many of the themes from those plays (like 'The Death of Tarzan') I later developed as short stories, without knowing I was writing any science fiction. For me, though, it started out as more of a fairy tale - there was a huge hunger in 1958 for something other than realistic novels. Within a week of publication, the first review came out, and the first edition had a print run of 30,000 copies, but then it went up to 100,000. Then a translation came out in Zagreb, where I met an American doctor whose wife was a publisher. So within two years of publication, my stories were being published in New York. That's something unimaginable today, because they've become so self-centered that they don't even accept British authors."
