I've always seen places as being very deeply connected to the experience that people have in those places. I think that probably comes through very much in my books.

For me, a relationship with a place is very fundamental. When you're moving - when you're leaving your life and the place where you've lived on a semi-regular basis - you tend to connect the sense of your entire life to that place that you've left.

We moved around a lot when I was kid. I'd lived in three continents before I was 12.

If you're too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people's lived experience is real when it doesn't match up with yours.

I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.

I had a pretty happy, loved childhood.

Everybody has ways in which they've been lucky in life, and everybody also has ways in which they've definitely rolled snake eyes.

I like books like 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,' where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.

I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.