Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.

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.

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.

The job for cable is to give the news and then also give the 'so what.'

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.

I prefer a change of surroundings anyway, and I like to be around some energy and white noise, so I usually go to a Barnes & Noble cafe or to the library on 5th and 42nd. In the afternoons, I do research, reading, editing, and play with the 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.

'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.

I did interviews with tennis greats, like James Blake and John Isner. I also interviewed tennis pros who aren't well - known but who made all the same sacrifices but had just a little spark of a professional career and are now still orbiting the sport, either as a teaching pro or a coach.

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.

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.

Dad met Mom in 1983 during the lead-up to the 1984 games. She was an Olympic downhill skier. In those days, the winter and summer games were held in different cities but in the same year, so there was more intermingling of winter and summer athletes at social functions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.