When you have an authority figure tell you something that distinguishes you, there's a little bit of a badge of courage or pride point that comes with it, and also some relief that the grownups actually have an answer for the problem. But, at the same time, there's suspicion and defensiveness, like, Why is the way I do things a problem? Maybe the way you do things is the problem. All of these things come with the very notion that you've been described.

A lot of times when I ask people what their apocalyptic fantasy life is like, they'll immediately say something like, "Oh, what I think is going to kill us is climate change or World War IV," and that's not what I'm interested in at all. The point is not about winning a bet about what's going to happen. The point is about the human action of examining the possibility, the kind of obsessive imagining about it.

I'm a horrible historian. My memory is bad. I read things and then I forget them. I can't understand dates and I can't measure time. Time is confusing to me. That's why I do a lot of manipulations of time in my books, in part because an orderly time is physically difficult for me to conceive of in my brain.

One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.

When you have an authority figure tell you something that distinguishes you, there's a little bit of a badge of courage or pride point that comes with it, and also some relief that the grownups actually have an answer for the problem. But, at the same time, there's suspicion and defensiveness, like, Why is the way I do things a problem? Maybe the way you do things is the problem. All of these things come with the very notion that you've been described.

I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.

To make a beautiful piece means you have really witnessed it and really made decisions about it.