Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

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

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.