For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.

You want magic to feel real.

Everything I learn about the world, whether it's the simple arcana of how commercial products are manufactured and designed and how they reach our shelves and where the chips come from and who does the code, to more profound things like whether or not a black hole might be penetrable as a wormhole, whether or not universes might be accessible from here, whether space can be stretched and compressed to enable faster-than-light travel without violating physical law - all of those things have tremendous story potential.

When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.

You want the mystical understanding of the cosmos to feel compatible with a scientific understanding of the cosmos, like it extends our understanding rather than unwriting it.

An X-wing fighter flies like an airplane. If you look at the physics, it's actually quite impossible.