When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?"

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?