Quotes from Erik Larson

'The Devil in the White City' - the 'White City' was the nickname for the World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

When I'm considering an idea, and there is an element of hubris involved, I generally feel comfortable that it's going to be a good story. Pride goeth before a fall. It's an element of a lot of big stories.

The most painstaking phase comes when the manuscript is set in 'type' for the first time and the first proofs of the book are printed. These initial copies are called first-pass proofs or galleys.

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.

I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift - never the Hardy Boys - but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan's war books. As to favorite character: I'm torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

I started deliberately looking for characters, ideally outsiders and ideally Americans. So I just started reading widely, as I tell my students to do: read voraciously and promiscuously.

My secret weapon is my wife. She's the best judge. She's a scientist and a natural reader. We've developed a detailed code for how she marks a manuscript, and I think it's what saves me from wild digressions.

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.

A writer could spend years reading already-published books just to gain a grasp of the historical terrain.

When I'm in New York, I have, like probably everybody else in Manhattan, a white-noise generator to use at night: a Marpac Dual-Speed Dohm-DS. It is terrific. I've never slept better in the city.

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.

Yes, William E. Dodd was the - became the - America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany. Prior to that, he was a professor of history at the University of Chicago - mild-mannered guy.

I found a book facing out that I'd always meant to read: William Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.' About a third of the way through, I suddenly, finally caught up to the fact that Shirer had been there in Berlin, from 1934 on, and was finally kicked out when the U.S. entered the war.

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.

At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd's comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.

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.

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.

I wouldn't say that I'm an Italian wine connoisseur. I do like red wine. I guess my favorites now are Bordeauxes. French.

There is something about the name Berlin that evokes an image of men in hats and long coats standing under streetlamps on rainy nights.

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.

For 'Thunderstruck', I discarded about a dozen ideas. And then one afternoon, I was thinking about wireless. I don't know why. I guess because it's become so ubiquitous. I was thinking that maybe there's something I could do about the origin of wireless, so I did what any self-respecting person does these days: I Googled 'wireless.'

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.

At some point in the idea process, I simply wear myself down and force myself to choose. But here's the thing: Once I do choose, suddenly all the other possibilities wither and die, and thus I never have a backlog of well-formed ideas waiting for me when my latest book gets finished.