I love to travel with my family or my two best friends because I completely trust them. I forced my two best friends into learning to scuba dive with me in Sri Lanka - it was amazing but also hideous because we were learning in very difficult seas.

My dad's so likeable, you wouldn't feel in competition with him. If any boyfriends have ever felt that, they're long gone.

Being a mum is something that's never bothered me too much. I have never felt a strong need to have children, but I am not averse to it either.

Actors think they're far more important than they are, and that can only lead to hurt. People with colossal self-importance have very far to fall.

My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits, which I saw a as kind of frivolous.

I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House, my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.

Admittedly, I possess virtually no expertise in science. That puts me in exactly the same position as most dogmatic environmentalists who want to craft public policy around global warming fears.

Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.'