An on going series of quotes from those most worthy of individuals, writers…  Disclaimer: Not all quotes are meant to inspire… Not all comments I make upon them are entirely honest either, occasionally Hannibal writes them…

William Blake was a strange fish. He was also one of the leading lights of the ‘romantic’ era poets, a writer, artist and illustrator. He was therefore a little mad, but only in the good way. He illustrated Milton’s Paradise Lost among other things and his illustrated version is perhaps the best known. He was a believer in ‘free love’ a hundred and fifty years before Woodstock, occasionally berated as a pornographer, accused of insanity, claimed to see visions, and by the standards of the time he was certainly a tad on the left wing side. So after his death he was almost entirely forgotten about for a generation before his work came back to public consciousness.

None of which is the reason I chose this quote today. Instead its because this quote was one I read several years ago that partly inspired me to create one of those doors and the place that it led to… So on top of everything else in a rich and complex life, William Blake was also, in part, responsible for this writer creating Esqwiths Piano Bar and Grill, the Passing Place of the novel of the same name.

And without Passing Place, Maybe my latest novel (released this week) might not exist either. As in part Miss maybe began life as a character in an early draft of Passing Place, while the story she told was to tell was never written and her part in Passing Place is little more than a cameo, Miss Maybe still has one important influence of events in that novel, all be it by no more than a passing smile at the piano player…

So Blake and his doors, influencing other writers even now, as such I tip my hat to him…