David Grann

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.”

“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 y...”

“Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, even a touch mad.”

“We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.”

“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 an...”

“Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.”

“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...”

“My night stand is more like a geological structure: a bunch of books piled on the floor with its own strata.”

“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 Hi...”

“Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.”

“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. Meanw...”

“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, i...”

“The only thing as murky as a conspiracy is what's happening in Hollywood.”

“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 fir...”