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 credit my parents for many things that had never seemed remarkable when I was growing up, and one of those things is how nonthreatened they were by my constant search for backup parents - other mothers and fathers would have bristled at this, but they never did. So I was always looking for other parental stand-ins, and I always found them.

I have a sustained interest in frippery. I can't refute the monster accusation, either. Some writers are awful on the page and kind in person. More often it's the other way around. I'd say I'm probably the same amount of asshole on the page as in life. I do try to be entertaining about it, however - in both places.

There are times I wish I didn't have a job, even though I love my job: I get to work with interesting, eccentric colleagues and equally interesting and eccentric subject matter, both of which are rarities. But, naturally, I would treasure having more freedom someday: of time and of movement. Will I always have a full-time job? I don't know. But I do know that I need to spend at least part of my week in an office, with other people.

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.

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.