Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human.
It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.
Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.
I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.
Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.
I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.
I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.
When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.
I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over.
I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.
I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.
Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line.
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.
In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.
Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.
There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers.
I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.
