I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

Nobody ever lived in the past.

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.