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.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

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.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.