As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.
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.
As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.
Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.
There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.
I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.