Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I can't promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.
I became a children's author by accident.
As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.
I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't.
I have never met an author who did not read voraciously as a child.
The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.