My father collected turtles when he was young. My parent's wedding album, there's two pictures of them getting married and the rest are just pictures of turtles. I remember they had Galapagos tortoises that they had somehow imported illegally and a bunch of other turtles too. I like the animals themselves. They're so self-possessed and self-contained and there's something wise and mysterious about them. I also like that they are prehistoric animals.

I know I'm a better editor than I was when I began, twenty years ago. I'm less scared of the text, I'm less scared of the writer, and, crucially, I no longer believe that I have to leave my mark on every story.

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.

When you're 21 you think, "Old people sound like this. Old people think like this." I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. They'd actually hoped that I might be an artist, and I was lucky again to grow up with people who delighted in making things: my father wove baskets and painted furniture and carved wood figures; my mother quilted and embroidered and sewed.

When you're young, your perception of what it means to be a writer is often less about the writing and more about what seems to be the accompanying life: speeches and travel and hanging out with other writers. You think that when you get published, your life will clarify itself to you somehow. But when you don't get published until you're middle-aged you know who you are already, and your life expands to make room for your writing, rather than orbiting around it. You realize that there's no one way to be a writer, and that the job is less of an identity and more of a vocation.

When you don't have to depend upon your creative work for money, you'll never really have to compromise... Knowing that is hugely liberating as well as artistically clarifying... Being practical about where your money comes from means you can be romantic about your writing... I believe that a healthy society is one that supports its artists, but I also know that that privilege, of being only an artist, is afforded to just a small number. Most of us have to find something else - or live a highly disciplined life, which I'm not willing to do.