I really feel that I had a genuinely diverse, multicultural upbringing, and I just don't find New York to be quite as diverse. Maybe I'm romanticising, but I feel that I was exposed to a real melting pot in terms of culture and pop culture. My kids are essentially middle-class, but I do try to remind them that they come from humble beginnings.
Although I grew up as a fan of the culture from the disco D.J. era as a young kid and hearing the beginnings of hip-hop, I'm hearing it all from another borough in Brooklyn.
Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
I sometimes think I might be autistic because I like to know - I need to know - my beginnings and my ends. I don't have to be in control of it, but I need to know what's going on.
To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.
The idea of the Internet as sort of open and democratic and free and with no hierarchy, the libertarian beginnings as it were, with peer-to-peer networks... I'd sort of like for everyone to just admit that we're beyond that now.
Fortunate people often have very favorable beginnings and very tragic endings. What matters isn't being applauded when you arrive - for that is common - but being missed when you leave.
When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.
It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
