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" Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.' "

Nathaniel Philbrick

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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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. "

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. "

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" A good leader has to at some point trust those around him; otherwise, nothing constructive is going to get done. "

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" 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. "

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

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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. "

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. "

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" We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out. "

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" One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past. "

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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

" I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" 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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" 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

" Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th 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

" You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points. "

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

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. "

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" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "

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" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "

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" You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare. "

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" Some of my books sort of have a provocative take. Sometimes you find interesting things about characters that show they weren't necessarily the way people usually see them. It can make for lively conversations, but that's great. Spark a little controversy, get people to think about it. That's what it's all about. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

" '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

" 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