My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.

After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.

There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

I was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.