My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.