David Plotz Quotes

People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss.

I think I did 97 pitch meetings, and even at the 97th meeting, there were questions I was getting that I hadn't had in the - you know, any of the 96 preceding ones.

I'm going to have a project-based life rather than a job-based life.

On one project I was hanging out with Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrel, and Christian Bale, and trying to explain economics to them for a movie I'm an advisor on.

Having good relations with lots of lots of different people helps a lot.

I do think there will be winners and losers in the 21st century economy.

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once.

When you have spent too much time with something, you may lose sight of what's marvelous about it.

The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do.

Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved.

The New York Times is the greatest media company around, arguably, and the people at the New York Times know a lot more about making a giant successful media company than I do.

What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It's an atlas, it's literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places.

I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.

It's much easier to hire really great people like that in New York and in Brooklyn in particular, than it is in Washington.

I sound like an evangelist or something.

Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics.

I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column.

А weekly column is really tough.

When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up.