First time Quote by William Finnegan

The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be…

— William Finnegan

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…

— William Finnegan

You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is…

— William Finnegan

It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of…

— William Finnegan

“Surfing, to begin with, was not a “sport.” It was a “path.” And the more you poured into it, the more you got back…

— William Finnegan

“I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he…

— William Finnegan

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.…

— William Finnegan

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,…

— William Finnegan

There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here…

— William Finnegan

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…

— William Finnegan

I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we…

— William Finnegan

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,…

— William Finnegan