I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'

I grew up around writers, and there was always a romance to them. They were charming. They would tell their stories of what they were working on, over the table.

After a traumatic event, people tend to store a series of memories and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. They remember exactly where they were and to whom they were talking.

I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.

Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere.

It was a very circuitous path. It was not very linear - I floundered about for many years.

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

A lot of the stuff I tweet is out of childlike curiosity.

My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.

One of the things I believe strongly in is developing institutions - legal, press, bureaucracies, academies - that are rooted in the pursuit of impartial truth. That aren't simply just bent to partisan ends or are corrupted for the powerful or for other ulterior motives.

Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.

I guess if I had to pick one interest that is unique, it would be giant squids - I'm disturbingly fascinated by them and even wrote a story about the hunt for them.

Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.

I don't hunt, I don't camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!

To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.

Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.

When criminals go free, the hope is that history will come in and provide some level of justice. It won't correct the sins, but it will at least record them. The sinners would be known, and the victims' stories would be known.

You want the story to be about something, have some deeper meaning, but there is also an emotional, almost instinctual, element, which is, does this story seize some part of you and compel you to get to the bottom of it?

I have lots of gaps in my education, and so I'm often picking up classic books that most people read years ago.

The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance - a 'good' bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies' man.

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.