I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly.

I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share.

People are sometimes losing their homes before being convicted of a crime, or their cash or their cars.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

I learned a lot, investigative methodology - wise, from litigators - watching their process.

Move thy tongue, For silence is a sign of discontent.

Only the shallow know themselves.

But this will not do, God will certainly punish you for stealing and for being unfaithful.

I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Yeah, there's a tendency to get pigeonholed in Hollywood.

If I see what you're up to on Facebook but I don't see your updates on Flickr, I'll still care about Facebook.

When I retire, I wanna be able to just lay back. Only way to make it happen is to be investing my money, not spending it.

Every child that isn't born, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, has the face of the Lord.

That's part of the appeal of time-travel movies: The notion of going back and fixing something.