Quotes About Validation

Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, 'Hey, I love your books.'

My whole life, I've been judged for how I look, which is part and parcel of being in the public eye, playing sexy roles and posing for lad's mags, but I want people to like me for my personality and brain.

It was humbling to see my brothers blowing up in music while I wasn't in the public eye, but it was also gratifying, because I'm doing what I love, and the self-esteem you get from that is so much better.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

When it comes to the awards and everything, and the press, the publicity, this is all icing on the cake to me.

I am happy that my short stint in Pooja Bhatt's 'Holiday' was well appreciated though it did not get as much publicity as it should have.

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

I didn't care where my works were published.

I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.

I tend to write things and don't go the next step and try to get it published. I don't want to do book signings and stuff.

I wrote two plays before I was cast on 'The Neighbors.' They actually got published, which was cool.

The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.

I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.

There's still, even now, a part of me that can't believe that I got published. That part of me has never gone away.

I don't chase publishers. Publishers chase me.

The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.

Publishing a novel was such a proud thing for me. When I was a kid, I used to say to my mum and dad, 'I'm going to write a book. You'll see.' So when I did ,and it was published, and people liked it, it was great.

If you're not the guy who is going to puff your chest out like a rooster and go fight somebody, our society discards you.

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.