Rogers described himself as a solitary boy, dreamy and lost in fantasy much of the time. He read incessantly, any book he could find, even the dictionary and encyclopedia. As a result of this solitude, he came to rely on his own experience and his own view of the world, a characteristic that stayed with him all his life and formed a part of his personality theory. In his later years he came to realize how strongly his early solitude and loneliness had influenced both his own personality and his formal approach to the study of personality. "As I look back," he wrote, "I realize that my interest in interviewing and in therapy certainly grew out of my early loneliness. Here was a socially approved way of getting really close to individuals and thus filling some of the hunger I had undoubtedly felt" (Rogers, 1980, P. 34).