If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.