You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.