Robert Kurson

“It's never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.”

“More than reading - much more than reading, in fact - I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art.”

“Violence, as it is for the mafia and most other criminal organizations, was bad for pirate business. By doing battle with prey, pirates risked damage to their own ships and injury to their crews. It also made them bigger targets for law enforcement.”

“I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.”

“For my new book 'Pirate Hunters', I follow John Chatterton and John Mattera, two world-class scuba divers, who teach themselves to think and act as pirates while searching for what would be only the second pirate ship ever found and positively identified.”

“So many of the pleasures of recreational scuba diving don't exist for the deep wreck diver. It's not beautiful scenery for the most part; in fact, it's usually very dark. It's physically burdensome. These guys carry almost two hundred pounds of equipment, and should any of that equipment fail, they risk death.”

“The more I learned about real pirates, the more exciting they seemed to me. They appeared to be even more dramatic than pirates of the movies or TV shows.”

“Pirates did not store all their treasures in treasure chests, then bury them and draw maps to them. That's a movie invention. In reality, pirates spent their money as fast as they could steal it because they knew they were living on borrowed time. They didn't want to wait around to enjoy the money.”

“I had an advantage over a lot of people who had gone to school and earned degrees in writing and had learned the rules for writing, so to speak. My style was just to tell a story but to tell it well, and that has worked out for me so far.”

“I think it's strange for people to read about themselves, no matter what's portrayed or how it's portrayed. But they get used to it, and I think they're fine with it.”

“Port Royal, Jamaica, was built for pirates. The town had a well-protected harbor, corrupt politicians and townsfolk, and a set of ethics that seemed passed down from Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“John Chatterton is the kind of person who always seems to be up to some kind of incredible adventure.”

“It wasn't who a person believed himself to be or what he pretended he would do in a given situation. It was what he did when he got there that defined him.”

“Stories were heirlooms in these parts.”

“I think that pirates represent every person's ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they've never done before or even dreamed of doing.”

“I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.”

“Even their downtime was epic.”

“A century before the concept took hold in America, pirate ships were democracies. Most captains were elected by crew and could be voted out anytime.”

“Pirates worked to avoid violence and fighting.”

“Real pirates were better than in movies, more daring and terrifying and cunning than any screenwriter could imagine. They operated during the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1720.”