Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
I started writing as soon as I started reading.
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
When I was 25, I was in a show called 'Bajour,' and I was going to leave the show because I couldn't breathe. I couldn't sing, and I couldn't do the basic dance steps I had to do. Fortunately, two actors in the production - who were also yoga instructors - taught me some breathing exercises, and my asthma was cured that day.
I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.