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.

When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you're in big trouble. I'd also add that many wonderful books by brilliant authors get ignored or overlooked, and that poor sales aren't (necessarily) a measure of your abilities.

We're living in a literary age, at least in America, that is marked by a sense of distance, a coolness, in all senses of that word. To be too obviously, unapologetically emotional is to risk being considered foolish, or at the very least not serious.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

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 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.

Health insurance, which is exceedingly difficult to secure as an individual in New York. Obamacare, while certainly better than nothing, is pretty awful, and if you have a complicated health history, as I do, you need premium insurance, which means private insurance. The challenge, though, is finding a company that will give you the privilege of paying up to $1,400 a month for it. When I didn't have a job, I spent more time thinking about insurance - not just paying for it, but securing it in the first place - than I wanted to.