43 Quotes by Candice Millard

As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

I had a moment in the Library of Congress among the presidential papers. I opened a folder, and there was an envelope in it. The front of the envelope was facing the table, so I didn't know what was in it. I opened it and out spilled all this hair. I turned the envelop over and it says, 'Clipped from President Garfield's head on his deathbed.'

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

'Honor in the Dust' is less about the freedom of the Philippines than the soul of the United States.

When I began work on my first book, The River of Doubt, which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelts 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

With the Lincoln assassination, the South didnt feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.