I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.

I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I'll always just be alone.

I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.

I don't want to make myself sound that spontaneous, because I'm not.

There will be scenes in a movie where people are walking through the park, or through a forest, and you're seeing the flickering leaves around them, and they're walking, but you're also hearing their words. It's an interaction between where they are and what they're saying that's both visual and verbal.

Some of it just involved thinking about, for example, the different kinds of science, what chemistry is.

By the time I finished the book [All Alone in the Universe], Robin Roy was saying, "More pictures!"