I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.
I was quite a reader before I became a writer.
Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.
I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts, I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.
I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
I've always been a writer.
I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.