Je vous en mets deux qui concernent son dernier roman : Four Freedoms
“I attempted to give Four Freedoms a documentary feel, but a lot of it's made up -- more than it might seem. All historical novels insert a guy who's made up into interaction with people who really did exist. The real Ludwig Wittgenstein studied engineering, flew kites, and designed a patented propeller, all that’s true -- but he didn't sell his patent to my entrepreneur character Henry Van Damme, because my character’s made up! (But the many suicides in the early history of flight recounted in the book are true.)
(...)
“All that stuff about early flight doesn't have to be in the book, but I just loved it. I had decided that the airplane pioneers in my book would be brothers, and then I discovered how many real pairs of brothers were involved in the early history of flight: the Wright Brothers, the Montgolfier Brothers, all these pairs of brothers! What is that about? What it seems to be is one brother has an idea and the courage to actually fly these crazy, suicidal machines, and you need the other one to do the calculations and the math and say, 'No, no, no, not yet!'
