I pride myself on having a journalistic remove..

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics..

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own boo….

Hitler was such an anomalous character - he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner and in the violence which overwh….

Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world.

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

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead..

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 Chicag….

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

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a….

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, th….

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….

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up..

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 engagi….

Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries..

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

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me..

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes..

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

I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding ….