Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.