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" As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

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" 'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" I'll watch anything, from action to art films. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Maybe it's because I was named for him, but I've always wanted to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's oversimplifying, but all Hawthorne's short stories and novels are, in one way or another, about guilt. Something profoundly disturbing must have happened to him at an early age. I'd like to know what that was. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

Nathaniel Philbrick