I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

I don't want to ever write a book that seems like it's pandering to younger people or talking down to people who I know are very smart.

When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.