A Quote by Charles de Lint

It seems like I always wrote, I just didn't think of it as a career choice. I just liked to tell stories ... to myself, to pen pals (I had a lot of them, all over the world). Of course this was in the days before computers were everywhere, and anyone could access the Web. You had to make an effort keeping up a correspondence, and the arrival of the mail once a day was a big deal. I think if modern technology had been around when I was a kid, I would never have left my bedroom except to take the dogs out for their run three times a day.
I never had the sense of myself as an accomplished artist, and I always had to work three times as hard as anyone else to make mypieces as good as they could be. I am never completely satisfied. There always seems to be something just beyond my reach.
I have always been a letter writer, and I found when my numbers got over half a million, I couldn't think about how many people there were out there. I had to think as if I were writing a letter to my brothers and sisters, to my good friends with whom I have had a correspondence since I could hold a pen.
I had never been a comic book person before, really, because I had no access to them. Once I had access, I thought that these are just another avenue for telling stories and delving into the imagination.
Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.
I think some people had, probably, a time in their life where they were good at two things and they had to make a big decision. For me, it was never like that - I just skied every day of my life and kind of made the right steps in the right direction, and so there wasn't really a choice of like, "What should I do?" I remember when I was like 10 years old, I was just wanting to be in the Olympics and wanting to compete in the World Cup, and there was never another choice in my head.
I either wrote at the end of the night or sometimes in the morning. Sometimes they were full entries, or others I just wrote notes about things that happened that day or funny thoughts I'd had. If I had a truly eventful day, I'd take the time to write it all down in great detail. I edited a lot of content out once it was all finished - there was way too much, and I didn't want to bore anyone. I like to keep the book [Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries] moving at a fast pace.
I've always really just liked football, and I've always devoted a lot of time to it. When I was a kid, my friends would call me to go out with them, but I would stay home because I had practice the next day. I like going out, but you have to know when you can and when you can't.
I went out and started on my way up in television. I wrote music, I wrote books, I played an instrument half-ass. I would always have liked to play in a band. I would always have liked to be a substantial writer, to write country music for big singers. I had all sorts of proclivities, but I never had any big success.
Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.
Well first of all I was nine weeks pregnant at the time and no one knew it. So it was - it had a whole other meaning for me not just because I had to let the dress out, you know, every few days before the actual day. But, you know, because that was the, you know, more important than anything else that was going on in my life. But in terms of actually winning I think I had been nominated four or five times before then. And every one of my co-stars had won up until that point.
I've always really just liked football, and I've always devoted a lot of time to it. When I was a kid, my friends would call me to go out with them, but I would stay home because I had practice the next day.
I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.
When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
I have had wonderful times and educated two children with my husband, and I just consider myself very lucky. I've had a very interesting career - I've been all over the world. I lucked out; I think you can say that: I really lucked out.
I never made conscious choices. There were times in my life that I chose the first job that came along because I was broke. I think that there were maybe a handful of times that I had a choice. In recent years, Ive had more of a choice, and its been very nice to have that choice, but most of the time, you just hope that theres another job after this one.
I had a rule that I would never force the muse in my younger days. I would follow the feeling. I would just put the pen down and walk away, and wait for it to come back. But these days, I have a kid, I tour a lot, and I'm always short on time.
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