Quote

I really started considering myself a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I wrote stories from my dreams and kept them all in a notebook that I still have.

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.

I still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for.

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.