When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

...I realized you can actually influence people really rather profoundly, and of course, this feeds back into your duty to the book, and if you're not careful it completely hamstrings you, because you go backwards and forwards between these two things. This does make me very, very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future, who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one.