Quotes from Nathaniel Rich

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

I try to write 1,000 words. Some people say it's not about the quantity but about the quality. I disagree. You need to write a lot in order to figure out what's good and what's crap.

There is something fascinating about every human being. The question is how much they're willing to divulge.

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.

In my experience, scientists are not always the most socially adjusted people, and may have habits and fascinations outside of their work that others might consider odd.

I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

The relationship between those who have burned the most fossil fuels and those who will suffer the most from a warming climate is perversely inverted. The inversion is both chronological (younger generations pay for their elders' emissions) and socioeconomic (the poor suffer what the rich deserve).

The way other people fantasize about surprise inheritances, firts-glance love, and endless white empyreal pastures, Mitchell dreamed of an erupting supervolcano that would bury North America under a foot of hot ash.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.

The message was: disorder always won in the end. The idea that man could order the world to his own design was the most pitiful fairy tale ever told.

You know, in the Soviet Union they used to have a tradition of ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology then acceptable to the state. And scientists in the rest of the world found that laughable as well as tragic.

Awfulness can happen at any time. That's what's so awful.

He could buy the Psycho Canoe with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.

He had no great advice to offer to his clients about this fact. He just wanted them to understand the likelihood that they would be incinerated shortly.

We've been calling your phone every second the last two days." "I'm OK, Dad." "We were worried. But then I thought to myself, you know what the Lion King says." "'I laugh in the face of danger.'" "That's my son!

They must have been going nearly twenty-five miles an hour.