I've never really understood the desire to be immortal myself. The idea of both wanting to live forever in some form and wanting to stay young forever just sounds exhausting. It's one of those desires that people think they want but when you actually stop to think about what it actually means, it's really awful. One of the reasons that life is bearable is because it's going to end soon. One of the main concerns of fiction is how do we make a life of 85 years or so meaningful.

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.

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'm an indulgent writer - I'm not sure, however, that's something I'm interested in changing. Writing should be indulgent: you should take big risks on the page, you should make big mistakes, you should be excessive at times. I let myself do as a writer what I probably would be less likely to allow as an editor.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

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.

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.