Writing is all about discipline, love, luck and endurance – and I sure know about endurance

British neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks: he summed up what many feel when he described the act of writing as ‘an indispensable form of talking to himself’. Photograph: The Oliver Sacks Foundation

“If I wrote another book, who would read it?” I lamented.

“I would!” enthused my brother, perhaps echoing Kurt Vonnegut’s remark, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”