Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.
I was quite a reader before I became a writer.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.