The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.
Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
I loved being at the 'Times,' and they were incredibly good to me. I think it's a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.
In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.
I produced some very good work at 'New York' magazine.
I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.
There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.
I'm a big fan of 'National Geographic', the magazine and the channel. Anything to do with the natural world. For years, when I was younger, I was convinced I would be a nature photographer, but that didn't pan out.
The Big Five publishing companies are dinosaurs trying to survive in a post-meteor world. They won't.