We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'

'Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' 'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by - Tweedledee, I think it was.' 'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, 'I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that - ' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.