We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world.