I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My greatest sense of accomplishment has come from having two amazing sons, but it's also a paradox in that the times when I felt like the biggest failure have been times when I felt like, as a parent, I wasn't making the right decisions or succeeding in the way that I should.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons.
In my career, there's many things I've won and many things I've achieved, but for me, my greatest achievement is my children and my family. It's about being a good father, a good husband, just being connected to family as much as possible.
For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.
During my first marriage, my career was the most important thing in my life.
My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.
In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.
I always wrote about things that were important to me. I think our past success showed that it was also important for a lot of others.
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.