When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

I'm married, I have a couple kids, I've traveled a lot, I've done book tours a lot, I'm happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.