Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

From a distance, the American political system is a remarkable success. We have accomplished the peaceful transfer of power for more than two hundred years, and that's unmatched by any civilization in human history. Up close, our political system still has all the ugliness and bad actors that you might suspect.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

I like to write in the mornings, so I try to protect 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. for me. I can drop our older two kids at school then write for a few hours.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

I do like Pat Conroy, and 'The Great Santini' is an iconic book.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

Don't copy another writer's style, because that is not authentic, and that's how it will sound. You develop your style over your whole life and through countless influences. Don't impose something artificial.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

I've seen terrorism close up, but I don't live in a state of terror at all. I'm comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

With tennis, if you're very good at a young age, you don't even go to your prom. You're down at some tennis academy in Florida where you're on the court 8 hours a day. It's brutal.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

If you look at top players - Steffi Graf, Andre Agassi - so many had a parent who was domineering to the point where you really had to question his sanity. It was nuts.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

It's common knowledge that professional athletes earn extraordinary incomes. What is less known or understood is how the advent of these riches has seeped into the conscious and unconscious ways in which our society now parents children.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

In September of 2001, I was living in the West Village of Manhattan, working from my home for a tech start-up.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

Don't write more than 3 hours at a time. I write three hours in the morning, 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. Other people are best late at night.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

New York can get on top of you if you don't have much money, but if you have money, it's kind of a playground.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

It's much easier to get disgusted when you've already banked 20 million bucks.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

If there is going to be any meaningful sales, it's going to be through word of mouth and people recommending it to their book club and then a thousand more book clubs do it, and then you get into real sales numbers.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.

Douglas Brunt
Douglas Brunt

'The Means' is about power. I have access to political insiders who helped me write a portrait of the real day-to-day in politics, which turned out to be crazier than Wall Street.