If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way.

My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I'm exhibiting continental drift in reverse.

Astronauts are like these mythic legends, but really, they are just regular people, people who wear chinos.

There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.

Picking my topics is sort of a process of elimination for me. Most things don't work for me. I like to cover science and unexpected things happening in labs. Also, theoretical research doesn't work for my style. I need scenes and interactions. Then, humor. I'm having the most fun when I can have fun with my work.

Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

I've always been a texting advocate.

Your mom is the first person you fall in love with, so it's loaded forever and carries all this baggage. There's almost always a communication barrier in place. In my case it's a language and cultural barrier, but other times, it's because your mother's love is conditional or because you're fundamentally different.

The thing that I find interesting about teens now is that no matter how desperate we seem to be taxonomically 'othering' them, for one reason or another - because the Internet, because whatever - I feel like a lot of the benchmarks and the experiences are, you know, same for teens through time immemorial.

Hopefully, if I get enough of a fan army together, people will let me write fiction.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

I have a lot of respect for people who write a whole book because I've heard it will kill you.

The thing about living in New York as a writer is that you hit that age where it feels like everyone has a book all at the same time. It's like that one year where you're invited to twenty weddings.

I love New York, but sometimes New York is so mean to you.

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.

I'm definitely an indoor kid who's turned into an inside person.

I commit words to paper and the Internet for everyone to pick apart, so I think I tend to be a lot more cynical and dulled.

As a consumer, I love superheroes.

My brother's in comics. I work in media.

I'm a big believer in puking out all your thoughts in a single sitting and getting some version of the work down, because the alternative just prolongs the agony. The first draft is hideous and ajskdlkdfksjdfslfjk, but it's just a map for where the big blocks go.

Part of me just wants 'Jane' magazine back, and 'Sassy,' too.