Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

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

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

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.

I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.

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