Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party.

Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you.

The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.

We think of writing a book as a process, but the very word - process - suggests that there is one: a template to follow, a map to guide us. If that were true, someone would have surely figured out some marketable method we could all buy.

Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.

Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.

The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.

Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

I don't believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society.

I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends.

I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think.

One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them.

My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others.

So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want.