When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.

When I won the MacArthur, I didn't receive a different amount of money than the men did.

I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.

A family living at the poverty level is unlikely to be able to afford a computer at home. Even with a computer, access to the Internet is another significant expense. A child might borrow a book from a public library; but it is not possible to take a computer home.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.

Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity.

My mom is a painter and photographer and my grandfather was an artist, so I've always been surrounded by creative people.

My mom's a children's television writer, so I was involved and around from a very young age. When I was eight, I did my first film with Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown, who are a quite well-respected Australian producer-director duo, and that just changed my whole perspective on what I could do in life and be.