William Finnegan Quotes

#1. I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we could ride a wave on one.

William Finnegan

#2. You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.

William Finnegan

#3. Surfing, to begin with, was not a "sport." It was a "path." And the more you poured into it, the more you got back from it - he

William Finnegan

#4. I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.

William Finnegan

#5. Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.

William Finnegan

#6. I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.

William Finnegan

#7. It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.

William Finnegan

#8. Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves are lousy. That's what I'm always telling myself, anyway - write while the surf's down!

William Finnegan

#9. Inequality is on the rise.

William Finnegan

#10. Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.

William Finnegan

#11. Mandela's political evolution was gradual.

William Finnegan

#12. For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.

William Finnegan

#13. Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.

William Finnegan

#14. There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here tends to happen in winter, so you need a good wetsuit, and the time window of good waves is often pretty short, so you have to stay on top of the forecasts.

William Finnegan

#15. The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

William Finnegan

#16. Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.

William Finnegan

#17. Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

William Finnegan

#18. I've felt afraid as a reporter many times. Sometimes it's sharp, as in a bad moment, or a bad situation; other times it's general, as in a country known for kidnapping, where you can never quite relax.

William Finnegan

#19. There are big surfing communities in every country with an ocean coast that I know in Central and South America. Same with Mexico, Bali, and nearly every island nation that gets waves in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But that's a relatively recent development in most places.

William Finnegan

#20. I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

William Finnegan

#21. Writing felt like it justified, barely, my existence -- this extremity of obscurity I had chosen.

William Finnegan

#22. As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.

William Finnegan