Quote

I didn't learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.

I wasn't really comfortable reading until I was 12.

My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.

I did not discover literature of any kind until I was about eleven, or ten.

I didn't read at all until I was 12. I just couldn't. It was too frustrating.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.

I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.