Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.
His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.
I find diplomatic histories the dullest of histories.
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.
Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.
Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.
Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world
I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.
I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.
One of the things I've always loved is collecting telling little details.
There is no secret orchard where ideas grow. Oh my, do I wish there were.
Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!
Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.
No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.
I envy other writers who claim to have a backlog of books they'd like to write.
I figured I was going to apply to one journalism school and let fate take a hand.
Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.
President Hindenburg had ultimate say over whether the government would survive or not.
I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.
Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
It's like being involved in a detective story, looking for that thing that nobody else has found.
As a writer, you always try to imagine, 'What if I were in a situation like this? How would I react?'
My life! That's a long story, too. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, like half of the world, I think.
A writer could spend years reading already-published books just to gain a grasp of the historical terrain.
Since I loathe the tedium of gym workouts, I take breaks for tennis with my eclectic group of tennis pals.
I'm always looking for a sign - not in a spooky, supernatural way, but in a 'neurotic writer' kind of way.
I'm often associated with parallel narratives or dual narratives. The 'Devil in the White City' was a fluke.
I usually look for stories with barriers to entry, something complex enough that no one else is going to do it.
The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.
There's a powerful appeal in the 'I didn't know that' effect. I love it when people say, 'Gosh, I didn't know that.'
To me, nuclear weapons are the secret crisis of our time. Frankly, everyone needs to reread John Hersey's 'Hiroshima.'
With my research, I really need absolute confirmation of what actually happened, direct physical connections to the past.
I wouldn't say that I'm an Italian wine connoisseur. I do like red wine. I guess my favorites now are Bordeauxes. French.
The SA, that is the - shorthand, those are the storm troopers. Those are the folks who are commanded by Captain Ernst Rohm.
. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.
I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.
How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an 'illegal alien,' you've already stacked the deck against them.
I was in Bucks County at the 'Bucks County Currier Times,' which is a great place to start for any reporter who wants to start out.
The Lusitania is a monument to this optimism, to the hubris of the era. I love that, because where there is hubris, there is tragedy.
There is something about the name Berlin that evokes an image of men in hats and long coats standing under streetlamps on rainy nights.
It's not my intent to write definitive history. 'Dead Wake' isn't a definitive history of the sinking of the Lusitania. It's my account.
That's what I love about history - nuance. I don't believe in unalloyed heroes. Everyone's got warts, and everyone's got a surprise side.
I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
'The Devil in the White City' - the 'White City' was the nickname for the World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
I've heard from the movie marketplace that James Cameron did such a killer job with 'Titanic' that it's almost impossible to do anything better.
The Nazis hijacked the Jewish thing early on by defining it as 'the Jewish problem' and started looking for a solution. These are not just words.
It's essentially taught in high school and college survey courses as an item on a timeline: 'The Lusitania was sunk; the U.S. gets into World War I'.
In 1933, the Gestapo was founded to become - to be a secret police agency to keep tabs on political opposition and so forth. Brand-new as of April 1933.
Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.