"I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about"
About this Quote
Restlessness is Talese's native language, and this line turns it into a flex. "I could come up with 50 stories" isn’t just productivity brag; it’s a declaration that the world is still overstuffed with meaning if you have the patience, appetite, and stamina to notice. The phrasing is almost offhand, like he’s shrugging while casually revealing a superpower: narrative abundance.
The key word is "thinking". Talese isn’t promising 50 finished pieces. He’s pointing to the private, unglamorous engine of his kind of journalism: long incubation, obsessive observation, and a willingness to live with half-formed questions. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the churn economy of modern media, where a "story" often means a take assembled at speed. For Talese, story ideas aren’t commodities; they’re leads you court, stalk, and finally persuade into revealing themselves.
Context matters because Talese helped define New Journalism, where reporting borrowed the tools of the novel without surrendering factual rigor. That approach requires surplus: you generate far more possibilities than you publish, because selection is part of the craft. Saying "50" signals not just imagination but discipline; it suggests he’s constantly sorting, ranking, and testing human dramas against his own standards of resonance.
The subtext is confidence laced with compulsion. He can’t stop seeing plots in ordinary life, and he doesn’t want to. The line reads like a simple boast, but it’s really a portrait of the reporter as someone permanently, almost inconveniently, awake.
The key word is "thinking". Talese isn’t promising 50 finished pieces. He’s pointing to the private, unglamorous engine of his kind of journalism: long incubation, obsessive observation, and a willingness to live with half-formed questions. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the churn economy of modern media, where a "story" often means a take assembled at speed. For Talese, story ideas aren’t commodities; they’re leads you court, stalk, and finally persuade into revealing themselves.
Context matters because Talese helped define New Journalism, where reporting borrowed the tools of the novel without surrendering factual rigor. That approach requires surplus: you generate far more possibilities than you publish, because selection is part of the craft. Saying "50" signals not just imagination but discipline; it suggests he’s constantly sorting, ranking, and testing human dramas against his own standards of resonance.
The subtext is confidence laced with compulsion. He can’t stop seeing plots in ordinary life, and he doesn’t want to. The line reads like a simple boast, but it’s really a portrait of the reporter as someone permanently, almost inconveniently, awake.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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