Douglas Brunt Quotes
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Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.
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I turned six in 1977. Youth athletics then was nothing like this, and I wondered how things changed so much. I started looking at our societal emphasis on sports, using the most tangible metric by which we measure emphasis: money.
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The last book I read before I wrote my first book - 'Ghosts of Manhattan' - was 'The Gold Coast' by DeMille. I loved it, and it gave me a lot of energy to start into my own.
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I do like Pat Conroy, and 'The Great Santini' is an iconic book.
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In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.
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The main influence on voters should be a series of robust debates among the candidates. It's a free country, so this is a tough problem to solve, but I'd love to see an election season with zero political ads, and all voters had to decide based on watching four national debates over the two months leading to election day.
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Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.
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I did interviews with tennis greats, like James Blake and John Isner. I also interviewed tennis pros who aren't well - known but who made all the same sacrifices but had just a little spark of a professional career and are now still orbiting the sport, either as a teaching pro or a coach.
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I like to write in the mornings, so I try to protect 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. for me. I can drop our older two kids at school then write for a few hours.
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Don't copy another writer's style, because that is not authentic, and that's how it will sound. You develop your style over your whole life and through countless influences. Don't impose something artificial.
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'The Means' is about power. I have access to political insiders who helped me write a portrait of the real day-to-day in politics, which turned out to be crazier than Wall Street.
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Dad met Mom in 1983 during the lead-up to the 1984 games. She was an Olympic downhill skier. In those days, the winter and summer games were held in different cities but in the same year, so there was more intermingling of winter and summer athletes at social functions.
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Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.
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From a distance, the American political system is a remarkable success. We have accomplished the peaceful transfer of power for more than two hundred years, and that's unmatched by any civilization in human history. Up close, our political system still has all the ugliness and bad actors that you might suspect.
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I've thought about bringing my children to retrace my own steps of the morning of September 11, 2001, but they're too young for that. Maybe when they're twenty. Maybe by then, even though it's been only a short subway ride away for years now, I'll have the nerve to see the 9-11 memorial for the first time.
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Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.
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With tennis, if you're very good at a young age, you don't even go to your prom. You're down at some tennis academy in Florida where you're on the court 8 hours a day. It's brutal.
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If there is going to be any meaningful sales, it's going to be through word of mouth and people recommending it to their book club and then a thousand more book clubs do it, and then you get into real sales numbers.
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I prefer a change of surroundings anyway, and I like to be around some energy and white noise, so I usually go to a Barnes & Noble cafe or to the library on 5th and 42nd. In the afternoons, I do research, reading, editing, and play with the kids.
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Dad was a retired hedge fund manager who made enough millions to retire and focus on my game. Before that, he was on the 1984 U.S. Olympic swimming team. No medals. He was accustomed to winning at everything, but no medals in 1984.
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If you look at top players - Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi - so many had a parent who was domineering to the point where you really had to question his sanity. It was nuts.
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Washington isn't utterly dysfunctional.
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The important thing is to write when your brain is at its best. Work edits or do outside reading with the rest of the day.
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My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I'd say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.