I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

I usually start with something that has some energy, like a compressed character or a situation that's wound up like a spring. Then all I have to do is let it go, let its energy carry the story. And that may not turn out to be the beginning of the book.

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.