Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.

I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.

The Christmas of 1965 was a Yuletide with a difference at my parents' tiny terrace house in North London: it was the first time my family had been able to see me on television.

Geeks are a critical driver of America's innovation ecosystem, from the entrepreneurs launching startups in Silicon Valley to the scientists experimenting in university research labs to the whiz kids building gadgets in their parents' garages.