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My favorite book in life is 'A Wrinkle In Time,' which I read before high school. It was my first introduction into the meeting of science and spirit and the universe and big thoughts and all of those interesting New Age-y concepts. It made everything make sense to me and opened up my mind.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.

My first book was the book that changed my life.

I think of a book and a play, or a book and a movie, as two separate things - I don't think of it as my novel having a new life.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.