Top 19 Robert Kurson Quotes

I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.

I think it’s strange for people to read about themselves, no matter what’s portrayed or how it’s portrayed. But they get used to it, and I think they’re fine with it.

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.

Port Royal, Jamaica, was built for pirates. The town had a well-protected harbor, corrupt politicians and townsfolk, and a set of ethics that seemed passed down from Sodom and Gomorrah.

I think that pirates represent every person‘s ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they’ve never done before or even dreamed of doing.

Pirate ships were built for stealth and invisibility. They filed no manifests with any agency or government. When they went missing or sunk, nobody went looking for them. They simply disappeared into the ether.

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.

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.

Once you discover that real pirates are more interesting than fictional ones, you can’t look away.

There is pressure when you have a very big book like ‘Shadow Divers’ to follow up with something big. But you can’t let that pressure determine what you do. You just look for the best stories, and when you find a great one, you tell it.

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.

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.

It’s never too late in life to have a genuine adventure.

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 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.

A century before the concept took hold in America, pirate ships were democracies. Most captains were elected by crew and could be voted out anytime.

Piracy was risky business, and injuries were commonplace; a single lost limb or gouged-out eye could end a pirate’s career. To encourage pirates not to hesitate in battle – and out of a sense of fairness – many pirate crews compensated wounded crewmen in predetermined amounts.

Pirates almost never sailed with women. Just four or five are known to have worked as pirates during the Golden Age. Two of them – Mary Read and Anne Bonny – became famous, dressing as men and fighting alongside one of the most celebrated of all pirate captains, ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham.

Violence, as it is for the mafia and most other criminal organizations, was bad for pirate business. By doing battle with prey, pirates risked damage to their own ships and injury to their crews. It also made them bigger targets for law enforcement.