Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't normally do pure historical work.
I'm sure every author has their own process.
I had always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.
I spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.
I am not, by nature, an explorer or an adventurer.
I love the magic of stories and the power of stories.
When I work on stories, I tend to be pretty obsessive.
A lot of the stuff I tweet is out of childlike curiosity.
There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.
I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.
I don't want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.
I don't camp; I don't hike. I hate bugs, and I'm phobic of snakes.
The only thing as murky as a conspiracy is what's happening in Hollywood.
Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.
I haven't read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.
If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.
Journalists are often portrayed as cynical. I often think it's the opposite.
I covered Congress, and everyone always wanted me to be a political reporter.
We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.
I don't hunt, I don't camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!
I wish a book could reach as many people as film, but we have to be realistic about it.
I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.
It was a very circuitous path. It was not very linear - I floundered about for many years.
Most of Gingrich's moderate positions are rooted in a realpolitik that transcends ideology.
Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.
It's funny: I don't know if she babysat, but I spent time with Judy Blume when I was little.
To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.
I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.
Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.
One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.
My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.
There are certain stories that remind you of the moral purpose that originally drew you to become a reporter.
Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.
I have lots of gaps in my education, and so I'm often picking up classic books that most people read years ago.
The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.
I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'
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.
I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.
I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.
One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.
We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.
Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.
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.
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.
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.
Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.
Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.
I really just choose stories that are compelling, have interesting trends and characters, and hopefully say something larger about society.
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.
Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.