When I was eight or nine there was a series of books called Landmark Books. I've got tons of them. It was from reading these history books that I became very interested in history - and I never stopped.
Most children live in a world of vivid fantasy which they seem to lose as they grow up.
Well, that I don't know. Children obviously go through a lot of intense reordering of their brains as they go through puberty, and I think in a lot of cases they probably lose a lot of their ability to have a fantasy life. Or it matures. But I think there's an actual biological reason for the whole thing. Someone once said that whatever happens in the first 18 years of your life, that's what you'll be writing about for the rest of it.