I think it’s so good to abandon projects. I never feel sad about not trying to publish that novel.

I don’t much want to play anymore. I enjoyed the game as a young man, but I don’t enjoy it now.

I read that at a key fork in the road moment for me where I just sold CD Baby and had a ton of money. I was like, “What to do now?” And I read this book from this filthy rich old man being entirely honest, and I thought I should just learn from his experience. ... So if what I’m doing seems weird, it’s because I took his advice to heart and I’ve quit the game.

No, I think they were two totally different careers, because when I was acting, I was always impersonating different people, so it was never me—it was never myself. When I started to sing, I suddenly felt naked. I mean, I knew that was going to happen, because that’s the reason why I couldn’t do it before—when I was a teenager, I just couldn’t play in front of anyone at all—it was impossible, my hands started to shake, my voice was gone, and I was so self-conscious of what people would think about what I was doing. Because I didn’t know how to play songs that anybody knew—all I knew how to play were my own songs, and so I had this feeling of having my own chords and my own things that weren’t—I was afraid of being judged as doing nonsense music. But then maybe what the acting did to me was that I got more courage to do what I really wanted to do, even though I had all these fears that were still inside me.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always was a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer and lead the writer’s life and be glamorous and go to New York. I just wanted to do my job writing, and to do it really well.

Either you’re listening out for the kids or you’re writing. So I wrote when the kids went to bed. I wrote between nine and midnight those years. And my husband would listen out if the little guy was sick or something. It worked out.

If you’ve got a book that’s writing itself, let it! Follow it as far as it takes you, as hard as you can. Forget the willpower business.

Because, yeah, I am afraid of madness. It’s scary.

As many times as necessary. With one story or novel, this may be five false starts and six or eight or ten full rewrites, beginning to end. With the next, it may mean just going back through it and over it fiddling details until I think it’s as good as I can get it.