At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.
I've always loved to write, and I wrote fiction all my life. That's what I thought I was going to do in my life - until I started writing songs.
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.
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.
Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?
I've dedicated more than 15 years to this theater and television thing; I want to spend the next 10, 15 years or so devoted to music.
I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India.
One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I still, sometimes, think I got sidetracked by this, like this is a tangent. My main thing was painting; I was just going to do that.
Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.
I was born into a family of gospel singers. My early ambitions were many. I was going to be a ballerina. I almost had that one come true until I tore a tendon, so I transferred from my toes to my throat and that's where the talent settled.
I had a little bit of a vocal strain at a certain period of time that made me lay off the singing, and while I was lying off the singing, I was pursuing the acting.
My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
