"[My tutor] worked with me to try to teach me how to read, without any success at all. And one day out of frustration asked me what I thought I was going to do in life if I couldn't read. And surprising both of us, I said I wanted to be a writer. And he laughed. He was very overweight — I remember the laughter rocked his body from his shoes to his chins. And he couldn't stop laughing..." - Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, founder of Writer's Studio, director of New York University's graduate student creative writing program

My Dyslexia at Amazon.com

From an interview on NPR:

"It was an interesting concept — why would I want to be a writer if I couldn't read or write? ... I'm not sure I can even to this day tell you why; of course I never read anything.

"I ... told [my mother] ... and she thought that was also comical. She was a reader, and she suddenly wondered at this fantasy of wanting to be a writer for someone who can't read. You know, when you think about it, it is an ambition, isn't it? It's the furthest extreme ... from the ignorance of illiteracy to the proficiency of someone who is apt, good, with words ...

"I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large. And I grew up thinking that this was a picture, an aspect, a landscape of reality, and I would like to do some of that. So it may be that I was already influenced by that."