I was very bad in socialising with other people. I hated making phone calls. That’s why I wrote letters to everybody I had to phone, or I thought I had to phone. My letters became longer and longer. I never thought about myself as a writer. Once I thought of myself as an actor, and that was painful enough. One day a Dutch publisher asked me to write the stories down I had just told him. That’s how Blue Mondays started.

Arnon Grunberg: Becoming a writer