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It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

I remember keeping a lot of journals and diaries and trying to form a complete thought just based off of those immediate, raw feelings. If anything, I was conscious about how I just always wanted to be as honest as possible, no matter how vulnerable it would make me seem.

My first book was called, 'Mountain, Get Out of My Way,' where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people's lives and trying to be motivational.

Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

I decided to write a book primarily because people talked me into it.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.