“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.

It’s not how close can you get to the ground, but how precise can you fly the airplane.

In 1903 the Wright brothers invented airplanes, because in 1902 they took a road trip across the country with their family.

When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.

No one is ever better off with dictators but there comes a time you know, when you’re on an airplane, they always say, “in case of an emergency oxygen masks will drop down. Put yours on first and then administer help to your neighbor.” We need oxygen right now.

Remember, you fly an airplane with you head, not your hands and feet.

The way the public sees it is this. If we don’t leave, we are idiots. If we do leave but don’t succeed in our mission, we are incompetent. But if we do succeed, it’s because it was easy and anyone could have done it.

The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.