Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
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In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels.
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I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school.
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What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated.
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To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes.
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You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.
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The irony is that Washington was, in reality, very much like Benedict Arnold. The big difference was that Washington was ultimately able to control his emotions, something Arnold never learned to do.
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You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points.
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After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
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It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine.
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Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb.
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More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'
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Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does.
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By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.
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Nantucket's English settlers, who first disembarked on the island in 1659, had been mindful of the sea's dangers. They had hoped to earn their livelihoods not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy isle dotted with ponds, where no wolves preyed.
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I don't subscribe to the idea that the founders or anyone else were somehow better than us and that we have to live up to their example.
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He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens.
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In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.
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I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I'm in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure.
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There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.
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'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
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When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
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As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
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Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
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I'll watch anything, from action to art films.