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, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.
The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.
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.
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.
I don't hunt, I don't camp, and I get lost on my subway to work here in Times Square!
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 often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.
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.
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 and songs were obliterated.
Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.
I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.
I don't cry too often reading books, but I did reading Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel, 'Say Her Name.'
If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.
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.
There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.
Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.
Like many people, I kicked around, struggled to become a writer, finally got my first full-time job around 27, 28, at 'The Hill' newspaper. They hired me as a copy editor, which was kind of funny because I'm semi-blind because I have an eye disorder.
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. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.
A lot of the stuff I tweet is out of childlike curiosity.
The giant squid is the perfect embodiment of a sea monster: it is huge, it has tentacles, it has big eyes, and it is absolutely frightening-looking. But, most important, it is real. Unlike the Loch Ness monster, we know it's out there.
