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

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.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

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

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.