The thing that I most enjoyed was reading books, and the only thing that made sense to me would be to somehow or other do this thing that I liked to receive. I went to Cornell. I never really understood it as a career. I was writing fiction. It never occurred to me to write nonfiction or journalism, I think partly because for the most part, nobody teaches it until you reach, say, college.
Nobody teaches nonfiction as writing, as literature.
You read books that have information in them, and then you read books that have information and are pleasurable. Basically everything I knew about the world I'd learned from novels, and they didn't seem to be deceiving me too badly or letting me down. At Cornell I kept switching majors. I believed in the idea of writing practice. So I left and took three years off where I basically tried to write every day.