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As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.

Ideas shape the course of history.

I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.