Erik Larson

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.

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.'

There is no secret orchard where ideas grow. Oh my, do I wish there were.

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.

I had a nice part at big newspapers, small newspapers, and then I went to a very big newspaper - 'The Wall Street Journal.' I wrote longer pieces, and I got tired of working so hard on stories that had a shelf life of essentially one day. So then I started working on longer magazine pieces and realized then that you might as well be writing a book.

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

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.

I have found from experience that it is often interesting and useful to start from the edges and work inward - another flaw of mine. I seldom approach things directly. I would have made a great moth.

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 Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

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?

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?

A very important part of my workday are the two Nunzillas on my windowsill. They keep me constant company. They're little windup toys, and when they move across the desk, they spark from the mouth. I think of them as my editors. They sort of remind you that the world can be a silly place.