I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.
I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.