“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.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance – a ‘good’ bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies’ man.”
― David Grann
“My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.”
― David Grann
“If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.”
― David Grann
“It was a very circuitous path. It was not very linear – I floundered about for many years.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.”
― David Grann
“You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.”
― David Grann
“I had always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.”
― David Grann
“I don’t hunt, I don’t camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!”
― David Grann
“A lot of the stuff I tweet is out of childlike curiosity.”
― David Grann
“The biggest difference with Twitter and writing long form is you’re part of a virtual community where you know people, or think you know them, through their links.”
― David Grann
“There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.”
― David Grann
“Honestly, I had no idea what to do on Twitter when I started. I didn’t follow it enough. Slowly, though, I started to realize what I’m okay at. Like, I’m just not particularly witty.”
― David Grann
“I’m kind of odd; I’m a technophobe who isn’t a technophobe. I’m afraid of new things, but eventually I love them. That happened with Twitter.”
― David Grann
“When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.”
― David Grann
“It’s funny: I don’t know if she babysat, but I spent time with Judy Blume when I was little.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“I had many different careers early on. I knew I wanted to be a writer. But, like so many people, I didn’t know how to be one – other than just do it. I didn’t know what form it would take.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“I don’t camp; I don’t hike. I hate bugs, and I’m phobic of snakes.”
― David Grann
“Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.”
― David Grann
“The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.”
― David Grann
“We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.”
― David Grann
“I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.”
― David Grann
“Baseball, of course, has long been played under the burden of metaphor. More so than basketball or football, it is supposed to represent something larger than itself.”
― David Grann
“Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country’s pastoral myth.”
― David Grann
“The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes – the boys of summer – is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.”
― David Grann
“Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I’m just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.”
― David Grann
“I’m sure every author has their own process.”
― David Grann
“I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.”
― David Grann
“If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.”
― David Grann
“To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.”
― David Grann
“I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.”
― David Grann
“I tried a few grad school programs because I didn’t know how to make it… Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called ‘The Hill.’ Even though my interest in politics wasn’t huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.”
― David Grann
“Most of Gingrich’s moderate positions are rooted in a realpolitik that transcends ideology.”
― David Grann
“In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios – whites and Indians – often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.”
― David Grann
“I spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.”
― David Grann
“I wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.”
― David Grann
“The only thing as murky as a conspiracy is what’s happening in Hollywood.”
― David Grann
“One of the nice things about ‘The New Yorker’ is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.”
― David Grann
“I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.”
― David Grann
“Journalists are often portrayed as cynical. I often think it’s the opposite.”
― David Grann
“I’m not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.”
― David Grann
“A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They’re crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it’s unfolding, or life as it’s unfolding.”
― David Grann
“There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They’re blessed, and they’ve worked at their craft, but there’s very few.”
― David Grann
“The public, the whites – not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States – were transfixed by the Osage wealth which belied images of Native Americans that could be traced back to the first brutal contact with whites.”
― David Grann
“There’s a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.”
― David Grann
“Each person, as they live through history, can’t see it all.”
― David Grann
“I have lots of gaps in my education, and so I’m often picking up classic books that most people read years ago.”
― David Grann
“I don’t cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman’s autobiographical novel, ‘Say Her Name.’”
― David Grann
“Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.”
― David Grann
“One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“I haven’t read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.”
― David Grann
“I guess if I had to pick one interest that is unique, it would be giant squids – I’m disturbingly fascinated by them and even wrote a story about the hunt for them.”
― David Grann
“I am not, by nature, an explorer or an adventurer.”
― David Grann
“You want the story to be about something, have some deeper meaning, but there is also an emotional, almost instinctual, element, which is, does this story seize some part of you and compel you to get to the bottom of it?”
― David Grann
“I don’t want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“I’ve done a lot of stories over the years, and sometimes there are larks, and they’re fun, and you kind of move on.”
― David Grann
“I never want to make people upset, but sometimes we may. When I interview people, I try to make it clear that our obligation is to what we uncover and to telling that story and to presenting it fairly and making sure everyone has a say.”
― David Grann
“I don’t normally do pure historical work.”
― David Grann
“I’m a very slow reader.”
― David Grann
“Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.”
― David Grann
“I look for stories everywhere.”
― David Grann
“I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.”
― David Grann
“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.”
― David Grann
“You have to go where the truth takes you, and that doesn’t always take you in exactly the same place where people you speak to might want,or suspects may want. That’s your ultimate obligation.”
― David Grann
“Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.”
― David Grann
“I often feel that with a crime story, the moral standards have to be higher. You’re deal with real victims and with real consequences.”
― David Grann
“We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.”
― David Grann
“My mother doesn’t need much sleep. At any hour of the night, you’d wake up, and she’d be reading. She’d read five, six books a week. When we went on sailing trips, she’d bring a suitcaseful for the week. Even then, her office would have to send more.”
― David Grann
“I covered Congress, and everyone always wanted me to be a political reporter.”
― David Grann
“There are certain stories that remind you of the moral purpose that originally drew you to become a reporter.”
― David Grann
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