So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
I was the typical little sister who wanted to be just like her older brother. When I was growing up, my brother wrote phenomenal stories, so I wanted to write them, too.
I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.
Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.