As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.