We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.