I love writing. I feel more connected to that than I do a lot of the other things.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write. But at times I have told myself that I don't necessarily have to publish anything else.
Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to.
Even if someone doesn't like it, or just likes it for me, storytelling has been the one true love story of my entire life.
You know what's weird, I just write to write, with no intention, I just write.
Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing.
I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.
I write because I can't imagine not writing.
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.
If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.
I never had a moment of wanting to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress, but writing was just a thing I always did. And then I started to really enjoy it.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.
It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance.
