I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we’re going to be truthful.
I think that most of the children’s writers live in the world that they’ve created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children’s writers are the children.
I’m quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I’m a failed scientist, and because I’m interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work – as a novelist.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they’re doing what they’re doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don’t actually like books.
I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I’m not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can’t do it.
One of the reasons I’ve gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that… they know there is a reality.
I’m not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don’t feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.