David Grann

“I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Journalists are often portrayed as cynical. I often think it's the opposite.”

“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.”

“Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.”

“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.”

“I'm sure every author has their own process.”

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

“I covered Congress, and everyone always wanted me to be a political reporter.”

“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 spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.”

“I have lots of gaps in my education, and so I'm often picking up classic books that most people read years ago.”

“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.”

“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.”

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