Quotes from Bryan Burrough

You never know what to expect when you're a writer visiting a movie set.

'Bonnie and Clyde,' while one of the best movies ever made, was far more interested in portraying Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as romantic anti-establishment Robin Hoods than what they really were: white-trash spree killers.

When you're going off to prison for the rest of your life, a lot of people do feel the need to explain themselves to all the people they have known.

I don't know the figures, but Hollywood must buy 100 rights for every movie that actually gets made.

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

American writers, at least those of us who are fortunate enough to support ourselves in the field, are by and large a lucky lot.

The underground is not a place but a way of life. You can be underground most anywhere, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Hermosa Beach, California.

From time to time, just about every Vanity Fair writer has a chance to sell rights to an article or a book to Hollywood.

I'm accustomed to Internet forums where rudeness and incivility are the rule, where too many people seem to take pride in their insults.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

We stand on the shoulders of revisionist authors such as Andrew Torget, Andrés Tijerina, Jesús F. de la Teja, Jeff Long, and Paul D. Lack, whose work is an antidote to the "Heroic Anglo Narrative" that's held sway in Texas for going on two hundred years.

The most notable book to support this hypothesis, Andrew J. Torget's groundbreaking 2015 Seeds of Empire, proved enormously influential

It was this line of thinking that led Murchison to become an outlaw, a defiant hot oiler. From 1932 until 1934, in fact, he may have been the biggest hot oiler in all of East Texas, and he didn't especially care who knew.

I learned," he said, "you always tell people how badly you've been running the goddamned company, so they've got some upside.

turn over the reins to the board of directors.

With every girl there was a moment before you broke up when you knew - you just knew - that if you left her right then, you would never make up.

No, history doesn't really change. But the way we view it does. In Texas, the history written by generations of white people is now being challenged by those who see the same events very differently. And man oh man, does that piss a lot of people off.

His arrival at the Alamo is one of history's great juxtapositional flukes, as if Teddy Roosevelt or Mark Twain had darted onto the Titanic at the last minute. The man and the place had almost nothing to do with each other, yet their stories would now be forever intertwined.

The furious pace of drilling was driven by what was called the "rule of capture," a legal term roughly translated as finders keepers. Oil beneath the earth doesn't conform to the niceties of lease boundaries, and a well drilled beside a competitor's lease might well suck up oil from both. No matter. What you got, you kept. Those who tarried might end up with nothing. Thus, every well was a race.

Settling in New York, de Zavala spent the next two years authoring a pair of well-received books, including a U.S. travelogue, Journey to the United States of North America, that's sometimes compared to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

changes in the story were the result of normal editing.

Yet few remember today that before Santa Anna was Texas's enemy, he was its friend. He is a singular figure in Mexican history, a man who held the presidency eleven times in twenty-two years.

Bowie was a seasoned swindler, always on the make, a man who fled to Texas rather than face the consequences of a series of land frauds he had attempted back in Arkansas and Louisiana.