Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

Girls are breaking barriers and boundaries every day in everything from sports and science to business and the creative arts.

And we invested three hundred thousand dollars, became the lead investor and I became Chairman of the Board of Scientific Data Systems, as I was at Intel for a while.