I started my career so early and developed in print for better or for worse, so I think there's a sense some of my earliest readers are kind of copilots on this voyage with me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was quite a reader before I became a writer.
I've always wanted to write an early reader. When I wrote my first novel, my goal was to make it an early reader, but it grew beyond the category.
My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
I began as a journalist for my pocketbook and a poet for my soul.
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
My mother was a huge, huge reader. I think I picked up very early how precious it was to write things in books and have people like my mother glued to the page.
I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.
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.