David Grann Quotes
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I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.
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The political hero is not like the sports champion or matinee idol or daring inventor; like the war hero, he is born only of tragedy.
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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.
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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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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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My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.
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After a traumatic event, people tend to store a series of memories and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. They remember exactly where they were and to whom they were talking.
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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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I'm a very slow reader.
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Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.
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Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all.
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I don't want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.
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I covered Congress, and everyone always wanted me to be a political reporter.
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The only thing as murky as a conspiracy is what's happening in Hollywood.
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One of the things I believe strongly in is developing institutions - legal, press, bureaucracies, academies - that are rooted in the pursuit of impartial truth. That aren't simply just bent to partisan ends or are corrupted for the powerful or for other ulterior motives.
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It took me a long time to be able to write for the 'New Yorker,' and for me, that has been the best job. I live a very conventional life, but reporting for the magazine has allowed me to do things I would never otherwise do, such as investigating a criminal conspiracy in Guatemala or trekking through the Amazon looking for a lost city.
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I had always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.
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There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They're blessed, and they've worked at their craft, but there's very few.
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I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'
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If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.
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Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.
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I have lots of gaps in my education, and so I'm often picking up classic books that most people read years ago.
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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.