He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

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

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

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

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.