My inner critic who had begun piping up about how hopeless I was and how I didn't know to write.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
I'm my own severest critic, and I realize when I make mistakes.
I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.
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.
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
I decided if I couldn't be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived.