Honestly, I never dreamed of being a writer; it felt too unrealistic to even dream about.
I'm not taking any interest in politics. I'm not involved in politics in any way. My life is in writing now.
When I was first writing, my little prayers were, 'Please, please, please. Let something be published someday.' Then it went to, 'Please, please, please. Let somebody read this.'
I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.
I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.
Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out.
Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.
I am living with my limitations and have no intention of becoming a writer.
Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.
It was always my dream to write for a living.
I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It's like a flu bug that you catch ... Even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.
There was a point when I thought I would primarily be a writer, but the acting seems to have got in the way. So when I do get a chance, I jump at it.
You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
I'm not going to pretend that I never fantasized about winning the Hugo. Or the Nebula, for that matter. I just never thought it was an actual real possibility.
I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn't know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.
I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.
I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.
I loved writing when I was a kid and thought about being a writer then. But I didn't have the confidence or belief that I could earn a living that way, so I never took myself seriously.
I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.
I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.
When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
