People are so helpful. People will stop what they’re doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.
It was an utterly phenomenal achievement.
History isn’t just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.
The truth isn’t just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.
My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.
May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.
You can’t love what you don’t know much about. You can’t convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.
I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it’s about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.
I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me – Nathanael Greene.
In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.
The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.
To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?
Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life. Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.