But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.
The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
