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" 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

Revolution

Good

Evil

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

Man

Future

" 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. "

" A survival tale peels away the niceties and comforts of civilization. Suddenly, all the technology and education in the world means nothing. I think all of us wonder while reading a survival tale, 'What would I have done in this situation? Would I have made it?' "

" I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Nathaniel Philbrick

Word

Though

" 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. "

" I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I'm in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure. "

" 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. "

" 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

Writing

Thinking

" 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. "

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

" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "

" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes. "

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

" The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population. "