The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.

Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

Digression is my passion. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten, and that are kind of surprising. The problem is, how do you pare stories away so that the book doesn't become a distracting jumble of material, and readers lose focus? In my experience, there's really only one way to do that. I pack it all in with the rough draft, then count on myself and my trusted readers to tell me what's good and what's not good.

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.