What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.