Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

The public, the whites - not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States - were transfixed by the Osage wealth which belied images of Native Americans that could be traced back to the first brutal contact with whites.

There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They're blessed, and they've worked at their craft, but there's very few.

A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.

I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.

Journalists are often portrayed as cynical. I often think it's the opposite.

I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.

The only thing as murky as a conspiracy is what's happening in Hollywood.

I wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.

I spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.

If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.

I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.

I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.

Like many people, I kicked around, struggled to become a writer, finally got my first full-time job around 27, 28, at 'The Hill' newspaper. They hired me as a copy editor, which was kind of funny because I'm semi-blind because I have an eye disorder.

Barry Bonds was still young when his father's fall began. Although Bobby still continued to put up good numbers year after year, he never lived up to expectations.

The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes - the boys of summer - is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.

Baseball, of course, has long been played under the burden of metaphor. More so than basketball or football, it is supposed to represent something larger than itself.

If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

The political hero is not like the sports champion or matinee idol or daring inventor; like the war hero, he is born only of tragedy.

Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.