Quotes from Erik Larson

I'm an early riser, for one thing. This started back when our kids were small. My wife and I would get up at 4 A.M. so that we could have a couple of peaceful hours before they woke up. That pattern has continued. I get up, make coffee, and while it's brewing, I do 50 sit-ups.

Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

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.

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.'

I write to be read. I'm quite direct about that. I'm not writing to thrill colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that's not my goal.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

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 Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

What is clear is that in 1900, Galveston was growing fast, had already become the number one cotton port on the Gulf Coast, and was already being referred to as 'the New York of the Gulf.'

My office is tiny. I think most people would be shocked if they came to my home and saw it. It is, in fact, the former makeup room of a gorgeous local TV newscaster. I keep a neat desk. Clutter makes me anxious.

I'd always been interested in maritime history, especially the great liners. I'd have done a book about the Titanic if it hadn't already been done to death by James Cameron and Celine Dion.

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've been asked a lot lately what message is there in the Lusitania for the modern day. To be honest, not much. Except that maybe hubris and overconfidence are always dangerous things.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood. Daniel H. Burnham

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.

No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing.

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.