Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by David Grann - Page 2

We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.

I had always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.

I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.

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.

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

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.

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.

Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all.

I don't hunt, I don't camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!

I haven't read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.

One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.

I am not, by nature, an explorer or an adventurer.

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'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 look for stories everywhere.

Crime stories are often sensationalized. They can provoke lower standards.

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?

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.

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.

I'm not a post-modernist. Especially when I do crime stories.

I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'

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.

I don't want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.

Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.

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.

One of the dangers today is that when we don't like what the facts tell us, we just attack the facts, and we undermine the credibility of institutions. That is true not just for reporting; it's true of when people are attacking the congressional budget office, or when they're attacking certain science - that's where we can get into a dangerous realm.

I do think that in many cases, where crimes have been covered up and perpetrators can escape justice, history can provide some accounting. It can identify the killers, ensure that their names are remembered, and it can give voice to and record the victims, and make sure, even more importantly, that their voices and their stories are remembered and heard. And I don't think there's justice, but I do think history can play an important role in that accounting.

I'm a big believer in the truth; I'm a kind of a fundamentalist. My goal is at least to the best of my ability to try to ferret it out. Especially when I believe there is a crime, I'm not a post-modernist: if somebody shot someone or poisoned them, they are responsible for somebody's death.

Early in my career I was much more confident in the almost omniscient powers of a reporter, because you could find anything out and then write the definitive piece about it. And as I got older, I got much more humble about trying to learn everything, with what eludes you, especially with history.