Douglas Brunt

“I've been pretty damn happy since 2001. More apparent danger than real danger for me, and even the apparent danger hasn't kept me from feeling warm, safe and loved. I've found love and a partner to raise three children that I'm glad to have brought into this beautiful world.”

“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.”

“I do like Pat Conroy, and 'The Great Santini' is an iconic book.”

“Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It's much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day's worth of crap you already wrote.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“New York can get on top of you if you don't have much money, but if you have money, it's kind of a playground.”

“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.”

“D.C. is a small town with some big-town features.”

“I've seen terrorism close up, but I don't live in a state of terror at all. I'm comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.”

“There used to be a few 'Great Santinis', but now there's many 'Great Santinis'.”

“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.”

“A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.”

“A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy.”

“On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.”

“At six years old, our son had friends who played soccer from 4 P.M. to 7 P.M., Monday through Friday. A six-year-old practicing as much as a Division I athlete.”

“Washington isn't utterly dysfunctional.”

“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.”

“New York is big, fast, energetic, and has the most and best of everything. While it can push the senses, it's the most convenient place to live. It's much easier for a ninety year old to live in New York City than in the suburbs. NYC is the best mass assisted-living facility on the planet.”

“It's common knowledge that professional athletes earn extraordinary incomes. What is less known or understood is how the advent of these riches has seeped into the conscious and unconscious ways in which our society now parents children.”