There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

We give each other a wide berth even if we have the flu, let alone... So, I think that's part of the stigma that people who have diseases suffer. It's almost infectious... if somebody is closer to death, they're almost a bad omen and I think that's terrible.

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.