What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.

I was fortunate that Yale has a very open and creative law school. I took many courses outside the law school, and every semester, the students had a literature reading group. I was asked to lead one on 'Dante and the Concept of Justice,' and it was around that time that I began writing the novel.

Perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost: the way technology doesn't fix problems without creating new ones.

We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.

Studying engineering was natural for me; I was always interested in technology and building things.

I always liked to draw, and when I was a kid, the Internet wasn't big at all, so I would go to Internet cafes and search Google images for cartoon characters and save it to my USB drive.