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

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.

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

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

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

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.