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If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

I don't want to be known for bad things in life, ever. I should be known for my work. People should love me for my work.

A lot of my work comes from my life experiences.

With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

Because you've done the horrible jobs, it gives you an even grittier determination to succeed.

A lot of life is about trying to turn bad experiences into something good. Usually if you work at it, you can figure out a way to do it. Even our worst misfortunes are gifts.

Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.

Having your work be the basis of fame, that's a far more stable feeling.

It is just that all my life I have been so involved in my work that I guess one could say in general that, whenever I had to balance my private life and my profession, my profession always won out.