The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
Don't worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.
Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.
Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions.
I don't know, but I do think that everyone has a story to tell. The question is, can they find the voice and the confidence to tell it? We lack the encouragement as young people to believe this; we very often think that writing is for clever people, which it isn't.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
I sound like an Englishman impersonating an American impersonating an Englishman.
Discourse about motherhood is chillingly narrow-minded. It's a tool the patriarchy uses, of course. So people complain about their kids or they complain about the pain of birth or they make motherhood kitschy, Mother's Day-y.
Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.