Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

We are the stories we tell ourselves