Erik Larson

“My life! That's a long story, too. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, like half of the world, I think.”

“Since I loathe the tedium of gym workouts, I take breaks for tennis with my eclectic group of tennis pals.”

“As a writer, you always try to imagine, 'What if I were in a situation like this? How would I react?'”

“I'm often associated with parallel narratives or dual narratives. The 'Devil in the White City' was a fluke.”

“The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.”

“I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.”

“Anytime you look at someone in detail, you're putting the camera on that person. What I typically look for is one or two or three really strong characters who will hold the narrative throughout the work.”

“In Washington, we had a grieving President Wilson, very, very much a lonely, grieving man. He had lost his wife of many years in August 1914 at about the same time the war broke out in Europe.”

“My secret weapon is my wife. She's the best judge. She's a scientist and a natural reader. We've developed a detailed code for how she marks a manuscript, and I think it's what saves me from wild digressions.”

“Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.”

“'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.”

“My goal is to produce as rich and historical an experience for the reader as I possibly can, to the point where when somebody finishes reading the book, he or she emerges from it with a sense of having lived in the past.”

“How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an 'illegal alien,' you've already stacked the deck against them.”

“American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.”

“When I'm in New York, I have, like probably everybody else in Manhattan, a white-noise generator to use at night: a Marpac Dual-Speed Dohm-DS. It is terrific. I've never slept better in the city.”

“Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.”

“I figured I was going to apply to one journalism school and let fate take a hand.”

“At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd's comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.”

“Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need....”

“It was David McCullough's 'The Johnstown Flood' that lit my imagination as to how I might one day go about writing book-length nonfiction, though my favorite of his books is 'Mornings on Horseback,' about the young Teddy Roosevelt.”