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

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 was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

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

I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.