Douglas Brunt

“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.”

“The job for cable is to give the news and then also give the 'so what.'”

“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.”

“A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.”

“Don't write more than 3 hours at a time. I write three hours in the morning, 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. Other people are best late at night.”

“I'm really troubled by the prevalence of single-sport specializations. I want my kids to do as many things for as long as they can. Specialization is a natural thing that should come later - it shouldn't come for 8-year-olds.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Your spouse, a sibling, a friend need to read your drafts. They have to be people unafraid to tell you what sucks. For early feedback, that's more important than professional editorial skill. Most people know what sucks.”

“Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.”

“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.”

“In September of 2001, I was living in the West Village of Manhattan, working from my home for a tech start-up.”

“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.”

“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.”