“Seeing someone reading something I wrote on an airplane – things like that are pretty awesome.”

In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you’re describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together.

I have an antique console stand-up radio that I bought in a yard sale, that I’ve always half-believed has magical properties. It’s in my office, and it has watched over each of the fifteen books I’ve written. It also helped me find my wife.

Rumor gets printed as fact. We may have lost our critical facility as a nation.

I certainly was a geeky kid myself, but to me, math and science were always these magical things- powerful tools you could use in incredible ways.

The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.

I’ve always loved adventure stories that involve brilliant kids using their brains to beat systems that seem unbeatable.

I write about nerds who go the extra mile and become rock stars.

There’s always going to be controversy when you write the way I write.

Businesses should follow and learn from others successes and failures in order to better understand and predict their own.

Well yeah, there’s definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

People rely on Wikipedia, and a lot of it is wrong. But because there it is on the Internet, they assume it’s right.

I believe Facebook is going all the way. They’re going to reach a billion members and will be the biggest company in the world. It will be a platform everyone goes on the Internet through.

I see myself as an entertainer.

I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents… I try to get inside my stories.

I write because I can’t sleep.

Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

If I make a set of rules, then a guy goes out and steals an airplane. He comes back and says, ‘It wasn’t in the rules.’

I don’t travel by airplane. I mean that because when my wife, my kids and I travel on trains or boats, we meet a lot of people and we talk to them.

Airplanes are the most beautiful when they are in the air.

Airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

If airplane safety videos have taught me anything, it’s that a mother puts her own mask on first.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.