Zitat des Tages von Erik Larson:
Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.
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.
I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.
At first glance, the story of the Lusitania doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would take on. I usually like ideas that are a little bit more complex, things that people don't know about - or maybe they once did, but now you bring it to life for them for the first time.
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.
I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.
The one place where I do think our culture today has to be extremely careful is this whole thing about illegal aliens. Because any time you start defining a significant block of the population as 'others,' or as less than you, you start getting into dangerous waters.
Captain William Thomas Turner, hero; villain, Schwieger. As I started doing research into him and into the submarine and so forth, I found that I was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. He's a young guy, 30, handsome, well-liked by his crew, humane.
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.
Digression is my passion. I'm not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten and that are kind of surprising.
To me, nuclear weapons are the secret crisis of our time. Frankly, everyone needs to reread John Hersey's 'Hiroshima.'
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.
If I'd been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?
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.
It troubled me that we had these reports of torture of detainees, we had people jailed at Guantanamo Bay who couldn't even talk to their lawyers and couldn't see the evidence against them - sort of fundamental bedrock civil liberties things.
The reason I choose the stories I choose - and it's why it takes me so long to find ideas - is that I'm looking for that very thing. I want an idea that begins, I want a middle that is compelling and will bring readers along, and I definitely want an ending.
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.
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
I think, one day, I might actually try writing a bunch of - a collection of essays maybe on the funnier side of the spectrum. I don't know. But it's fun to have, frankly, Twitter as kind of an outlet. When you're writing about dark things all day, it's kind of fun to have fun.
There is something about the name Berlin that evokes an image of men in hats and long coats standing under streetlamps on rainy nights.
I read a book called 'Transatlantic', which is a history of the great shipping lines. Also, of course, I had read about the Titanic and saw Leo drowning at the end of the 'Titanic' movie and all that stuff.
I knew from an online search that the Wisconsin State Historical Society, on the vast University of Wisconsin campus, held the papers of Sigrid Schultz, a spunky correspondent for the 'Chicago Tribune' who became one of Martha Dodd's friends in Berlin.
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.
I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.
There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.
The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel.
I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.
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.
As a writer, you always try to imagine, 'What if I were in a situation like this? How would I react?'
Hitler was such an anomalous character - he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner and in the violence which overwhelmed the country initially. I think diplomats around the world... felt like something like that simply would not be tolerated by the people of Germany.
The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago.
The thing I always tell my writing students - I'm not a full-time instructor, by any means, but periodically I've taught writing students - what I always tell them is that the most important thing in narrative nonfiction is that you not only have to have all the research; you have to have about 100% more than you need.
The sinking of the Lusitania wasn't the proximal cause for the U.S. entering WWI. It was almost two years between the sinking and the war declaration, and President Wilson's request for war never mentions the Lusitania.
I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.
