David Grann Quotes

Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.

The biggest difference with Twitter and writing long form is you’re part of a virtual community where you know people, or think you know them, through their links.

I often feel that with a crime story, the moral standards have to be higher. You’re deal with real victims and with real consequences.

You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios – whites and Indians – often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.

If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.

I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.

It’s funny: I don’t know if she babysat, but I spent time with Judy Blume when I was little.

Like many people, I kicked around, struggled to become a writer, finally got my first full-time job around 27, 28, at ‘The Hill’ newspaper. They hired me as a copy editor, which was kind of funny because I’m semi-blind because I have an eye disorder.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I’d grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.

I don’t normally do pure historical work.

I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

Most of Gingrich’s moderate positions are rooted in a realpolitik that transcends ideology.

The public, the whites – not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States – were transfixed by the Osage wealth which belied images of Native Americans that could be traced back to the first brutal contact with whites.

To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.

My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.

Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.

Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.

When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.

I’m kind of odd; I’m a technophobe who isn’t a technophobe. I’m afraid of new things, but eventually I love them. That happened with Twitter.

I don’t hunt, I don’t camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!

You want the story to be about something, have some deeper meaning, but there is also an emotional, almost instinctual, element, which is, does this story seize some part of you and compel you to get to the bottom of it?

When criminals go free, the hope is that history will come in and provide some level of justice. It won’t correct the sins, but it will at least record them. The sinners would be known, and the victims’ stories would be known.

Barry Bonds was still young when his father’s fall began. Although Bobby still continued to put up good numbers year after year, he never lived up to expectations.

I had many different careers early on. I knew I wanted to be a writer. But, like so many people, I didn’t know how to be one – other than just do it. I didn’t know what form it would take.

When I work on stories, I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to pay bills or to shave. I don’t change my clothes as often as I should.

I look for stories everywhere.

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

I never want to make people upset, but sometimes we may. When I interview people, I try to make it clear that our obligation is to what we uncover and to telling that story and to presenting it fairly and making sure everyone has a say.

My mother doesn’t need much sleep. At any hour of the night, you’d wake up, and she’d be reading. She’d read five, six books a week. When we went on sailing trips, she’d bring a suitcaseful for the week. Even then, her office would have to send more.

Honestly, I had no idea what to do on Twitter when I started. I didn’t follow it enough. Slowly, though, I started to realize what I’m okay at. Like, I’m just not particularly witty.

I wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.

I grew up around writers, and there was always a romance to them. They were charming. They would tell their stories of what they were working on, over the table.

I had always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.

I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn’t very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere.

The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes – the boys of summer – is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.

The giant squid is the perfect embodiment of a sea monster: it is huge, it has tentacles, it has big eyes, and it is absolutely frightening-looking. But, most important, it is real. Unlike the Loch Ness monster, we know it’s out there.

Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.

Baseball, of course, has long been played under the burden of metaphor. More so than basketball or football, it is supposed to represent something larger than itself.