A Quote by Ben Mezrich

I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories.
I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I'll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it.
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.
I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.
To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.
One thing you learn about doing nonfiction is that you've got to get it right, fact-check, do your research. You've got to not only get the facts right but represent the subject to the world in a way that insiders feel like it's an access port and outsiders can access it. If you're too insider, you block access to anyone else.
The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.
I write two pages - that's all I write. It takes me about an hour. I've learned that's all I'm capable of and to push myself beyond that is foolhardy. It's a very delicate thing, and I will not abuse it. So I write two pages, then I get up from the computer.
AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?
Even in a manuscript form, 'The Girl on the Train' sort of leapt off the pages as a contemporary suspense drama-slash-thriller. It has all the mechanics of a thriller, but at the heart of it was a great character study.
The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.
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