If we're on long-haul flights I've been known to sleep on the floor so I hear the engine.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
On long haul flights I always drink loads and loads of water and eat light and healthy food.
I calculated the amount of time I spent with my father during my entire life... the total amount of time I had with him, if you add up the hours, was about two months. My father was a busy man... we had very few opportunities to really sit down and talk as father and son.
My occupation is an open question. I was once an assistant professor of mathematics. Since then, I have spent time living in the woods of Montana.
If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.
Even though my parents are American, I spent my whole childhood and adolescence abroad.
St. Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council because he understood, as no Holy Father had in a long time, religion spoke to and found its language and symbols - its entire sense of the sacramental nature of existence - in the imagination that reveals not just the penalties of living, but the wonder and awe of our existence.
I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qualities from.
I spent my entire life being afraid. I was afraid of everything - height, flights - I had no idea why.
I grew up in one of those households where, growing up in Detroit, you gravitate towards music and cars because we were the capital for a long time. Especially during my childhood. We were the Motown sound. We were the Motor City.
If I have to fly economy, there is no way I am flying more than two and a half hours. I am just not doing long-haul economy flights. I did it once to the Caribbean and never again.
I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating.
The day my father died seemed longer than my entire childhood. The day I felt my first success seemed fleeting, hour-long, not long enough perhaps. I wondered where it went. Even the cycle of time confounds me. I work till dark, until sunrise on most days and fall asleep as the world awakens to light. My friends call me an owl. I like to think of myself as Batman – the prince of darkness.
I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.