Zitat des Tages von Robert Kurson:
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'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.
I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.
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 did not store all their treasures in treasure chests, then bury them and draw maps to them. That's a movie invention. In reality, pirates spent their money as fast as they could steal it because they knew they were living on borrowed time. They didn't want to wait around to enjoy the money.
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.
The more I learned about real pirates, the more exciting they seemed to me. They appeared to be even more dramatic than pirates of the movies or TV shows.
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.
Once you discover that real pirates are more interesting than fictional ones, you can't look away.
