Daily Inspiration Quote by George V. Higgins

“Data” is a wonderfully unromantic word to hang around the neck of “artist,” and that’s precisely Higgins’s point. He’s prying the halo off inspiration and replacing it with receipts: names, dates, routines, the dull grain of how things actually work. In Higgins’s world - crime, courts, cops, talk - the difference between someone playing at expertise and someone making something that feels inevitable is research so thorough it disappears into the prose.

The line carries a small, delicious rebuke to a certain kind of literary swagger: the writer who mistakes vibe for authority. A dilettante can mimic the surface of a milieu, but without data the work gives itself away. Characters start talking like the author’s assumptions. Plot turns hinge on convenience rather than procedure. The reader senses it, even if they can’t fact-check it.

Higgins also smuggles in a broader argument about craft. “Data” isn’t just factual accuracy; it’s specificity, the kind that produces texture and constraint. Constraint is where art shows up. Knowing exactly what a guy in a backroom would say, what he wouldn’t say, how long a deal takes, what a weapon costs, what a judge actually does on a Tuesday - those particulars force the writer into choices that feel earned. Style becomes not decoration but compression: the clean, hard edge that comes from understanding too much and selecting the right sliver.

In an era that romanticizes authenticity while outsourcing attention, Higgins’s maxim reads like a warning: if you want to sound like you’ve been there, you’d better do the work of being there.