I became a writer when I began to take it seriously.

The first thing I did when I picked up any instrument, when I was five years old, was write a song. It's kind of funny; I thought about it, statements that it's a "solo effort" — it's kind of like, "Oh, well I've been doing this since I was five." I was kind of doing this before I did anything else.

I have often been asked how I came to write. The best answer is that I needed the money. When I started I was 35 and had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted.

Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never had before. It was like a bullet out of the gun.

Once I dreamed I'd write songs.

I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words.

It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package.

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write. And have been, ever since.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

It was a means to act, to write my own stuff so that I could act in it. I really fell in love with it and tried hard to get good at it and hone that craft.

In 1959 it was absolutely insane for Ken McCormick to say, yes, he was going to publish a book of short stories. Now everybody in the writing world is reading and writing short stories.

I didn’t even consider becoming a writer until, I recall, feeling overwhelmed with the prevailing situation at the time I started, having just returned to the country. It is; therefore, let’s call it, accidental good choice at the time of idleness.

However, when I’m able to think and write about fiction, I very much enjoy it. I began writing fiction for myself when I was about 10 years old, because I ran out of books to read. I discovered that I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed reading. Therefore, I think the pleasure I get out of writing fiction is what enables me to maintain my momentum and interest—and is the reason I’ve been writing for almost 30 years, even though most of what I’ve written has not been read by anyone.