I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.

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

One of my favorite moments in that book [As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth] was when something happened that I had no idea was going to happen.

I love when I'm trying to do something I don't know how to do, and it kind of figures itself out along the way. And that means messing up a lot. That means throwing away a lot of drawings.

I do like to be surprised.

In some ways I'm very structured.

I creep over to my chair and sit there with my notebook and my thermos of coffee. It's my best time for thinking, because I haven't started thinking about anything else yet, and the thoughts can kind of go in and out of my head.