Every story was being made up. My true friends weren't the ones speaking. It was people who never knew me, making up stories. Even my local paper put a $1,000 bounty out for information about my whereabouts.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The people who knew me and knew my work and trusted me, they knew then as they do now that I've never fabricated or plagiarized a story. People who know me know I didn't do this.
I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.
So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.
It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling.
There have been so many false things written about me by people who don't know me.
I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.
I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception... I have deceived my friends - and I had millions of them.
All the stories I write come from someone I've met or some anecdote I've heard.
We sat down and told stories that happened to us in our childhood, to our children. They were all basically based on the truth. These stories were funny and poignant to us. They just took off. These are all stories from my life.