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
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.
Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.
Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.
I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure every author has their own process.
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.
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.
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.
Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.
Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.
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.
I don't camp; I don't hike. I hate bugs, and I'm phobic of snakes.
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.
It's funny: I don't know if she babysat, but I spent time with Judy Blume when I was little.
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.
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.
I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.
Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.
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.
If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.
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.
We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.
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.
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.
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.
When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.
There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.
The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.
