I'm an indulgent writer - I'm not sure, however, that's something I'm interested in changing. Writing should be indulgent: you should take big risks ….

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange charac….

There are times I wish I didn't have a job, even though I love my job: I get to work with interesting, eccentric colleagues and equally interesting a….

My great strength as an editor, I believe, is structure: I know how to reorder a piece, I know how to reach into a jumbled story and extract the impo….

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and ….

My father collected turtles when he was young. My parent's wedding album, there's two pictures of them getting married and the rest are just pictures….

I know I'm a better editor than I was when I began, twenty years ago. I'm less scared of the text, I'm less scared of the writer, and, crucially, I n….

When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your….

We're living in a literary age, at least in America, that is marked by a sense of distance, a coolness, in all senses of that word. To be too obvious….

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about bein….

Many writers hate the shilling process, and I understand that. However, it's really the only thing about the publication process you can somewhat con….

I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. They'd actually hoped that I m….

To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade o….

Much of an editor's job is in fact pretty nanny-like in nature: in many ways, you're there to protect and defend, to reassure and clean up. What I as….

Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; ….

I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist….

I wanted to write about the time when science became modern, around the 1950s. Right after physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, science started being so ….

I have one friend to whom I've told more than I've ever told anyone, and yet there are significant territories I have and will never let him access -….

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishi….

Sometimes the most difficult thing you can do as an editor is not make a single note - the idea that everything and everyone needs editing is, in rea….

When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor sho….