If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

I'm always hungry for people.

Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.

I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

When I meet people I try to make a joke out of my occupation, explaining that what I do all day is sit alone in a darkened room, flicking through some pages, jumping on a treadmill now and then. I keep my serious work as a writer private, but that doesn't mean it's not serious work - quite the opposite.