Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Hailey

There is a curious modesty-and-brag two-step in Hailey's sentence, the kind you hear from a professional storyteller who wants credit without sounding needy. "When I began writing" frames the whole thing as accidental discovery: the work itself grants permission to travel, to meet "fascinating people", to unearth "history". The real claim sits inside that soft packaging. He isn't just reporting research; he's positioning the novelist as an investigator, someone whose curiosity earns access to worlds most readers will never see.

Hailey came up in the high-water era of the "research novel" - glossy, procedural, systems-obsessed books like Airport and Hotel that sold expertise as entertainment. The verb choices ("was able", "did travel") sound almost bureaucratic, but that's the point: he writes like a man documenting a case file. It signals credibility, the promise that the plot's machinery is grounded in real rooms, real conversations, real archives.

The subtext is commerce as much as art. Travel and proximity to insiders are both sources and marketing: the author as worldly guide. Then he ups the stakes with "history, which has not been discovered before", a phrase that edges into the language of scholarship and scoop culture. Coming from a novelist, it's less a peer-reviewed claim than a seduction: read me and you'll feel like you're learning something illicit and new. It's a neat encapsulation of Hailey's brand - fiction that flatters the reader's appetite for both story and insider knowledge, while flattering the writer's role as the one who got in.