Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.
When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.