David Grann

It took me a long time to be able to write for the 'New Yorker,' and for me, that has been the best job. I live a very conventional life, but reporting for the magazine has allowed me to do things I would never otherwise do, such as investigating a criminal conspiracy in Guatemala or trekking through the Amazon looking for a lost city. ”

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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? ”

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 have lots of gaps in my education, and so I'm often picking up classic books that most people read years ago. ”

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. ”