I’m too quick to jump to a negative conclusion. For example, if I’ve had a book come out recently and I’m with a friend who doesn’t mention it, instead of thinking, “This person hasn’t mentioned my book because they’re busy and haven’t had time to purchase it, much less read it, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t like me,” I will go to, “This person doesn’t care about me,” which is such a terrible, self-centered way to think. People really are busy and their world doesn’t stop just because I’ve published a novel.

Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”

Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.

Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

I’ve been devoting a lot of my time in the last five years to musical theater. It’s been my new passion. I’d love to write a musical comedy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the troubadours. I’ve always thought that would make a wonderful musical, about a troubadour who falls in love with a beautiful queen.

I wrote it because it was so. Because it was the force of my experience that pushed the book out of me, like a baby is pushed out of its mother. The mother doesn’t say, “I’ll push this one out for my friends.” You push the book out because you’ve got to – as you push out the baby.

I still think the greatest gift you can give your kids is easy exposure to interesting things. Not compelling them to go see things, but making them feel that art and literature are just parts of the world

Writing about how much you love your wife is bad form, it seems like boasting

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

That’s the book I hope to get written sometime in the next ten years.