I'm very interested in science.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.