26 Quotes by Bryan Burrough

Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point. “I can tell you,” Karpis said. “How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover. “We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said.

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.

But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.

Something had to be done fast. A letter: that was the answer. As many lawyers do when nursing a grievance, Nusbaum knew it was important to get their anger down into writing. As Cohen and the investment bankers shouted and cursed around him, he began dictating

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

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.

All the way back in 1999, when I first stumbled upon the idea of a project tracking John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson and all the major Depression-era bank robbers, I thought the subject was too big to be a single book. Instead, with a friend's help, I pitched the idea as a miniseries to HBO. To my amazement, they bought it.

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

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