David Grann Quotes
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Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.
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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.
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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 wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.
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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 guess if I had to pick one interest that is unique, it would be giant squids - I'm disturbingly fascinated by them and even wrote a story about the hunt for them.
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I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.
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I haven't read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.
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There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.
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It was a very circuitous path. It was not very linear - I floundered about for many years.
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To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.
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The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance - a 'good' bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies' man.
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Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.
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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.
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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.
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I've done a lot of stories over the years, and sometimes there are larks, and they're fun, and you kind of move on.
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A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.