Quote

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

The first 13 years of my life, I lived in China. My parents were missionaries there, and I was an only child. Often I felt lonely and out of place. Writing for me became my private place, where no one could come.

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.

As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.

Quite a lot of people wanted me to write about my family, I suppose for fairly obvious reasons, and there was always something that would stop me, I thought they were asking me for the wrong motives.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.