274 Quotes by David McCullough

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?

There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

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.

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.

We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.