Sometimes the most difficult thing you can do as an editor is not make a single note - the idea that everything and everyone needs editing is, in reality, a fiction. I've gotten pieces where I thought, Well, I could do this or that, or change this word, but in the end, I leave it. Changing something is not necessarily equivalent to making the piece more true to itself, which is the point of editing: it's just changing it because you feel you can or should or must.

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.

When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your ability to make money and your relative renown, which has dangerous consequences: the first means you may end up in debt; the second means you may end up a horrid bore.

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.

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.

I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.

Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; to arrange your estate - and the ones in which you get to choose, or at least have some knowledge of, how and when it might happen. One can't elude death, but one can have a good death.