Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.
I never thought I was good enough actually to write.
I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did.
The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.
For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.
I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
Writing is inherently scary.
I thought that everyone would just think I was a bit of a joke as a writer.
Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most.
People say I'm not good at writing about men. My dad left when I was 16. Give me a break. I'm doing the best I can.
I'll always struggle over saying I'm a writer, even if I won the Booker Prize.
There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
