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I don't really consider myself to be famous.

I don't feel famous and I didn't want my autobiography to be like a Paris Hilton story.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

I'm astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I didn't start making music in order to be famous.

Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

I'm not the most famous guy in the world; my work is spread out across different mediums, and I never write the same kind of story and rarely even do the same character from one year to the next.