To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open to the possibility that the answer sometimes precedes the question itself.

I was fortunate to be at that school in an era in which encounters between students and teachers were encouraged; there were a number of teachers who lived on campus, and they'd regularly invite students over for dinner on the weekends. I hope it's still like that: being treated seriously by an adult you admire is a great gift. Children, like adults, want respect - but it's only when you're older that you realize how few people actually extend it.

I have one friend to whom I've told more than I've ever told anyone, and yet there are significant territories I have and will never let him access - in large part because I'm trying to protect him, and one of the responsibilities of loving someone is protecting him or her, even if who you're protecting them from is yourself.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

My great strength as an editor, I believe, is structure: I know how to reorder a piece, I know how to reach into a jumbled story and extract the important narrative. And I can do both of these things very fast. I also think I've become better at cutting text. You don't always relish it, of course, but by now I know how to distill something without sacrificing its essence.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

The big characters who occupy science, especially modern science, are all "off" in fundamental ways. I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. I wanted to pay tribute to that mind.