Quotes from Nathaniel Philbrick

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.

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.

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

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease.

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

I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it.

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

In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Whaling was the oil business of its day.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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