I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.
You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.
Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.
One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.
Had I not become entangled with music, I would have become an author much earlier.
Have a picture in mind of the kind of career you want, the kind of writer you want to be. This will help you make tough decisions when you reach crossroads - choosing an agent, deciding to accept deals.
My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author.
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
