John Grisham is the author of 38 books, including his latest novel, Camino Island.

“A Time to Kill didn’t sell. It just didn’t sell. There was never any talk of going back for a second printing. No talk of paper back. No foreign deal. It was a flop. And I told my wife, I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna do it one more time. I’m gonna write one more book…hopefully something more commercial, more accessible, more popular. If this doesn’t work, forget this career. Forget this hobby. I’m just gonna be a lawyer and get on with it.’”

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Dan P. Lee is a contributing writer at New York.

"I don't believe in answers. That's what compels me to write all of these stories. None of them ends nicely, none of them ends neatly."

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Nicholas Schmidle is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

"I was in a taxi, leaving Karachi to go attend this festival, and we started getting these very disturbing phone calls from newspaper reporters that didn't exist, all of them asking me to meet them at various places in Karachi. I had read enough about the Daniel Pearl case to know what happened in the days leading up, and this was very similar. ... We kept driving towards the festival, and shortly after that, friends started calling. They were watching local television, and it was being reported that 'Nicholas Shamble,' editor of Smithsonian Magazine, had been kidnapped. And I was like, 'All right, I get the hint.'"

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Jessica Pressler writes for New York, Elle and GQ.

“I really like hustlers, stories about someone who comes out of nowhere and tries to do it for themselves. Those people are just easy to like. Even when they're sort of terrible, they're easy to like.”

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Heather Havrilesky writes the Ask Polly and Ask Molly newsletters. Her latest book is Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage.

“It’s not a good story when you're bullshitting people. I didn't want this book to feel like bullshit…. I wanted to show enough that you could feel reassured that it's normal to feel conflicted about your life and the people in it. It's normal to feel anxious about how much people love you. And it's normal to feel avoidant about how much people love you. It's normal to feel like a failure in the face of trying to stay with someone over the course of your entire life.”

Ken Burns is a documentary filmmaker whose work includes The Vietnam War, Baseball, and The Central Park Five. His new series is Country Music.

“History, which seems to most people safe — it isn’t. I think the future is pretty safe, it’s the past that’s so terrifying and malleable.”

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Ben Taub is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”

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Kelley Benham is a writer and editor at the Tampa Bay Times.

"People connect with this story in a really visceral kind of way, usually because of some experience they've had or someone close to them has had. I've had 90-year-old women crying into my phone about babies they lost 70 years ago. I've had people kind of sneak up to me and tell me about babies that have died that they don't talk about, but that they carry with them all the time. I've had premies who are grown up—those are my favorite—you know, "I'm 20 now and I have a scar just like Juniper's scar, and thank you for helping me understand who I am."

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Jeanne Marie Laskas writes for GQ and the New York Times Magazine. Her latest book is To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.

“I hate saying this out loud, but it’s true: I’m really shy. Fundamentally, I'm 100% scared most of the time. I’m scared and wondering how I can not be noticed because I don’t know what to say and I’m shy. If you say I’m a good listener, that's why … I become more invisible so I’m more comfortable.”

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Jon Favreau, former chief speechwriter for President Obama, is a columnist at The Ringer and co-host of Keepin’ It 1600.

“And then Obama comes over to my desk with the speech, and he has a few edits. And he’s like, ‘I just want to go through some of these edits and make sure you’re ok with this. I did this for this reason. Are you ok with that?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, buddy. You’re Barack Obama.’”

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Rafe Bartholomew is the former features editor at Grantland and the author of Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.

“I never saw it as something negative because [my dad] comes out, to me, at the end, extremely heroic. … He becomes this dad who I idolized as a bartender, a guy who would hang out with me and make me laugh, a guy I just adored almost every step of the way. I mean, of course, everybody gets into fights. But to me it was always so obvious that he had overcome the problems in his childhood, he’d overcome his own drinking problem, he’d done all these things, and by the time I was older, he’d even found a way to get back into writing and self-publish a couple of books of poems about the bar. So he’s sort of managed to tick off all those goals, just maybe not on the same schedule, maybe not in the most normal way.”

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Matthew Shaer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and The Atavist Magazine.

“I could not turn off the freelance switch in my head. I could not not be thinking about these different types of stories. My Google Alert list looks like a serial killer's.”

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