Novelist

I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.

Human love and desire is my bag.

To say 'A High Wind in Jamaica' is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. But that's completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.

You can sort of start to write around 10. You also become a good reader around that time, and you want to imitate the thing that you love. I got praise for it, and then I found that it was a great way of translating my life, so I would write little stories and plays and things. At that point, it was kids' books that I was reading.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do but either walk around or read a book or work on your book, and they all seem helpful.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

I never wanted to be a scientist.

I don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'

To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'

During every book, I have a nervous breakdown. Usually it's about two thirds of the way through the book - I'm just comatose on the couch for at least a week, and I eventually break through it and have an answer about how to fix the thing.

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.

With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.

I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.

I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book.

Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.

Every writer is an outsider.

I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.

My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.