Lawyer even sounds like liar.

Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It's not just losing them. It's losing the possibility of family.

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.

All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.