Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.

My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old.

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Now I basically just read spy stories because they're about solving a puzzle within the constraints of history. It's the tick tock, the clockwork that I'm interested in.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.