The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late I can still live my dreams.'

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.

The hoary joke in the literary world based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama he could have made it as a writer.

Screenplays I didn't really care about journalism travel books getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.

Every year for New Years I write down all of my goals and dreams and put them in my Bible. At the end of the year I go and pull the paper out and check this off and check that off.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description as science writers but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers you see but we're also realists of a sort.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.