I was a nerdy kid and I was writing and showing other fellows who are still my friends what I was writing. We were sharing that and kept sharing it. The experiences they had were so different than mine.

When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time.

I am still trying to find out things. And I inevitably tell myself the story in different ways every time I think about it.

The stories on standardized tests don't have one author, therefore they can never authentically be in the first person. Imagine that! Everywhere, there are these tests that have been written by multiple people.

For me, writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.

I've been writing most of my life; it's just something I do.