David Grann Quotes
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Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.
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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.
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Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.
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The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.
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Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.
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I've always been a big believer that you can use the elements of storytelling to bring the reader along and to hopefully illuminate a lot of the important things. It's a challenge, but it's something I kind of believe in.
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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.
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There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.
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If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.
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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?
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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.
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The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.
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Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.
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I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.
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We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.
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I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.
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The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.
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A lot of the stuff I tweet is out of childlike curiosity.
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I'm sure every author has their own process.
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I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.
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I don't camp; I don't hike. I hate bugs, and I'm phobic of snakes.
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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.
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I wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.
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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.