Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.