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Any journalist worth his or her salt wouldn’t trust me.
Spending when the math’s not there and the numbers aren’t there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it’s filled with IOUs because the government’s been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion.
You can never trust what you read.
When it comes to locations, I’m one of those crazy authors who has to see it, touch it, taste it, before I trust myself to recreate it for my readers. Having said that, visiting a locked-down pediatric psych ward was the most intimidating research I’ve ever done – and I’ve visited maximum security prisons, shooting galleries, bone collections, etc.
I would say I was always very ambitious and goal-oriented, but rather than being just a go-getter hustler, now I surrender a lot more and I trust my path a lot more.
In high school I was always thinking, ‘Should I be doing more? What else should I be doing?’ Now I know it will all come to me. I just have to trust my path, so that’s very different.
The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
Writing doesn’t come real easy to me. I couldn’t write a novel in a year. It wouldn’t be readable. I don’t let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
We associate the North Atlantic with cod. The motto of Newfoundland used to be ‘In cod we trust.’ It was a joke, but it was essentially true. But there is no cod anymore. And that’s extraordinary. It’s all because of either greed or politics – Canadian politics.