I mention this to give confidence to all non-fiction writers: a point of craft. If you master the tools of the trade — the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction — and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That's your ticket to an interesting life.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading. Writers may write for any number of good personal reasons — ego, therapy, recollection, validation of their lives. But what they produce will have a validity of its own to the extent that it’s useful to somebody else.

I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you think you know about it, or, if it’s a story you’ve never heard before, introduces you to a whole new place or a whole new idea. I’m basically trying to tilt your worldview a little bit.

Nonfiction requires logic and more careful thinking; sometimes I have to remind myself to be less self-conscious when I’m writing fiction. You have to turn off the part of your brain that tells you things don’t make sense or aren’t any good. Whereas that voice can be useful in nonfiction writing.

The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the work­shop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Per­haps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons.

Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading.

There are many recipes for success. There is no single way to win. But nearly all recipes include two ingredients: curiosity and drive.

Usually the recipe for a bestseller is to give people what they want. My challenge is and was: Give them what they do not expect. Be severe with them. The world of media is full of easy answers, wash-and-wear philosophies, instant ecstacies, what-me-worry Epiphanies. Probably readers want a little more.

That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

I've found that if you put aside the desire to be seen and just write from an authentic place of wanting to tell stories you know and that you think the world might profit from hearing, it will take you a long way, even in nonfiction.

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.