You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

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.

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

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

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.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

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