I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

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.

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

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to read and set the instruments, as well as the basics of taking off and landing.

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.