I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.

There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.

'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.

Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.

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.

There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'

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

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.