Words matter. These are the best Douglas Brunt Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The job for cable is to give the news and then also give the ‘so what.’
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.
There used to be a few ‘Great Santinis’, but now there’s many ‘Great Santinis’.
I’ve been pretty damn happy since 2001. More apparent danger than real danger for me, and even the apparent danger hasn’t kept me from feeling warm, safe and loved. I’ve found love and a partner to raise three children that I’m glad to have brought into this beautiful world.
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.
The last book I read before I wrote my first book – ‘Ghosts of Manhattan’ – was ‘The Gold Coast’ by DeMille. I loved it, and it gave me a lot of energy to start into my own.
The important thing is to write when your brain is at its best. Work edits or do outside reading with the rest of the day.
I’m really troubled by the prevalence of single-sport specializations. I want my kids to do as many things for as long as they can. Specialization is a natural thing that should come later – it shouldn’t come for 8-year-olds.
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.
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.
In September of 2001, I was living in the West Village of Manhattan, working from my home for a tech start-up.
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.
Dad was a retired hedge fund manager who made enough millions to retire and focus on my game. Before that, he was on the 1984 U.S. Olympic swimming team. No medals. He was accustomed to winning at everything, but no medals in 1984.
Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It’s much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day’s worth of crap you already wrote.
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.
When the kids are down, I have a drink and watch ‘The Kelly File.’
It’s much easier to get disgusted when you’ve already banked 20 million bucks.
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.
I turned six in 1977. Youth athletics then was nothing like this, and I wondered how things changed so much. I started looking at our societal emphasis on sports, using the most tangible metric by which we measure emphasis: money.
