David Grann

“We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.”

“I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'”

“It was a very circuitous path. It was not very linear - I floundered about for many years.”

“One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.”

“My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.”

“One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.”

“I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.”

“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.”

“The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.”

“I am not, by nature, an explorer or an adventurer.”

“I don't want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon”

“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.”

“There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.”

“I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.”

“During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).”

“If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.”

“Barry Bonds was still young when his father's fall began. Although Bobby still continued to put up good numbers year after year, he never lived up to expectations.”