96 Quotes by Chloe Benjamin

I grew up in San Francisco, and I trained as a ballet dancer until college.

I wish I'd had more fun in college. I spent a lot of time in my dorm room, reading or writing while listening to my Sarah McLachlan Pandora station.

I've always been interested in the tension between knowledge and mystery, between science and religion, and the various ways we cope with the unknown. Some of those are productive; some can be attempts to pin down things that are by nature impossible to know.

I work at a non-profit called ALS Worldwide, where we work with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) patients and families. It is often heavy work, but I'm grateful to be able to contribute to the ALS community. I'm constantly learning about science and medicine, and I have the honor of corresponding with patients throughout the world.

When people ask how I came up with the concept for my second novel, 'The Immortalists' - four siblings visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell anyone the date that they will die - I always wish I had a better answer.

I think readers either love or hate nonlinear storytelling, and it's true that it can be more difficult, both to write and to read.

I did invent the idea of using lucid dreaming to treat sleep disorders, but I was influenced by many real-life researchers - from forefathers like Freud and Jung to Stephen Laberge and Rosalind Cartwright, who explore lucid dreaming and parasomnias.

You can't have bad things happening to characters simply for shock value; you need to provide context.

It's an unbelievable, absurd paradox that we have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing which one will be our last.