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The 32-year-old  bestselling author gives his take on first novels and last thoughts.

1) Big Debuts. The success of my first book,  Everything Is Illuminated , allowed me to have control of my time and my purpose, and all but guaranteed that I would have a second book published—which is something I never remotely took for granted. I was an author all of a sudden, and it felt good, if confusing. I hope I would have been just as grateful for the experience of writing the book if it had been utterly trashed or ignored. But then, you wouldn’t be asking me the question right now.

2) Mental Twilight .  There are not many moments in my day from the time I wake up, especially now that I have children, until about 9 at night when my thoughts belong only to me. It’s important to me to pay attention to those moments of one’s own. It’s like mental twilight, between having done and having to do again. It’s then, when I’ve got a moment “to myself” in the deepest sense, that I can best appreciate all the things that surrounded me in my day.

3) Food for Thought .  Anytime people have a ritual in their lives—a deliberate choice of routine—it’s significant to me. Being a vegetarian is one of my ways of being deliberate within my life. Eating can be so mechanical, something for which one feels exactly nothing. We eat merely to get full. It’s nice to have a chosen approach to food; eating a certain way—even if it’s arbitrary, although my vegetarianism is the opposite of arbitrariness—brings consciousness to an everyday act that rarely calls for any.