The worst day of writing is still better than the best day of telemarketing.
I had not expected to ever be in a position to able to say, 'Hey, see the magazine with J. Lo on the cover? They reviewed my book inside.'
I liked the idea of being a writer more than I liked the idea of writing.
If you don't try your hardest, and you're unsuccessful, you always have that excuse.
As much as I love my daughters, I wasn't happy with only being a stay-at-home-dad, and my wife encouraged me to try, to really try, at being a writer. More than anything, I didn't want to let her down.
There is a huge tension in trying to write with small children because they demand your attention and your time with a fierceness that can be matched by nothing else, but if you are successful in writing while you have small children, I actually think that your writing is likely to be deeper than it was before.
I've said many times that there only two things to write about: love and death. And when you have children, you remember that the world is full of sharp corners and dangerous things, and suddenly you have these small, soft creatures, which you love in almost painful way.
While Shakespeare wasn't the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he's one of the loudest voices.
I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
If you realize early what your influence is, you can have a better understanding of what you are writing about.
The story of trying to live up to the myth is more interesting than the myth itself.
