I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.

After this I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

My father was a writer and an acting teacher.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal because if you lose it then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel I try and fill up notepads.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.