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

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?

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

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

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.