Quote

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

David McCullough

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

David McCullough
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 7
Author
Biographer
Historian
Journalist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
David Gaub McCullough
David G. McCullough
Start
Understand
Find
Need
Needs
Writing
Really
Time
Began

More quotes by David McCullough

Image
They must be cool but determined...he threatened instant death to any man who showed cowardice.
David McCullough
Image
Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
David McCullough
Image
Nobody ever lived in the past.
David McCullough
Image
Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.
David McCullough
Image
Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
Image
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them. (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
Image
There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, What was it like when you were a kid? I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.
David McCullough
Image
People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.
David McCullough
Image
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.
David McCullough
Image
The first of all qualities of a general is courage.
David McCullough
Image
I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.
David McCullough
Image
How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?
David McCullough
Image
The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement... To do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance.
David McCullough
Image
Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
David McCullough
Image
Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all.
David McCullough
Image
I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.
David McCullough
Image
My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.
David McCullough
Image
History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.
David McCullough
Image
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
David McCullough
Image
History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.
David McCullough