Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

Some suggestions for you :

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

Great writers probably shouldn't be ranked, at least not by me.

We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we're in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.

I was a nerdy kid.

I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

Hour by hour, minute by minute, I make decisions that seem like the right things to do at the time but which prevent me from reflecting on the most significant, most critical fact in my life: Every day, I participate in a system that is weaponizing our big, gorgeous planet against our kids.

Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.