Top 18 Robert Kurson Quotes

I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.

More than reading – much more than reading, in fact – I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art.

John Chatterton is the kind of person who always seems to be up to some kind of incredible adventure.

Violence, as it is for the mafia and most other criminal organizations, was bad for pirate business. By doing battle with prey, pirates risked damage to their own ships and injury to their crews. It also made them bigger targets for law enforcement.

Port Royal, Jamaica, was built for pirates. The town had a well-protected harbor, corrupt politicians and townsfolk, and a set of ethics that seemed passed down from Sodom and Gomorrah.

So many of the pleasures of recreational scuba diving don’t exist for the deep wreck diver. It’s not beautiful scenery for the most part; in fact, it’s usually very dark. It’s physically burdensome. These guys carry almost two hundred pounds of equipment, and should any of that equipment fail, they risk death.

For my new book ‘Pirate Hunters’, I follow John Chatterton and John Mattera, two world-class scuba divers, who teach themselves to think and act as pirates while searching for what would be only the second pirate ship ever found and positively identified.

I’m a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I’m interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.

Pirates worked to avoid violence and fighting.

It’s never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.

I think it’s strange for people to read about themselves, no matter what’s portrayed or how it’s portrayed. But they get used to it, and I think they’re fine with it.

Once you discover that real pirates are more interesting than fictional ones, you can’t look away.

Pirate ships were built for stealth and invisibility. They filed no manifests with any agency or government. When they went missing or sunk, nobody went looking for them. They simply disappeared into the ether.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that pirates did wear eye patches and have peg legs and have brightly colored beads. I never knew what the beads were for. They really were for frightening and terrifying their prey.

I had an advantage over a lot of people who had gone to school and earned degrees in writing and had learned the rules for writing, so to speak. My style was just to tell a story but to tell it well, and that has worked out for me so far.

Pirates almost never sailed with women. Just four or five are known to have worked as pirates during the Golden Age. Two of them – Mary Read and Anne Bonny – became famous, dressing as men and fighting alongside one of the most celebrated of all pirate captains, ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham.

I read almost exclusively nonfiction when I read, because even though it’s harder to find a great true story, when you find one, the idea that it actually happened is immensely powerful.That’s what moves me the most.

Piracy was risky business, and injuries were commonplace; a single lost limb or gouged-out eye could end a pirate’s career. To encourage pirates not to hesitate in battle – and out of a sense of fairness – many pirate crews compensated wounded crewmen in predetermined amounts.