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I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor.
David McCullough
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David McCullough
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 7
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Biographer
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Journalist
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Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
David Gaub McCullough
David G. McCullough
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More quotes by David McCullough
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
I think it is one of the most extraordinary elections, a turning point for our country and for the world. That remarkable young man [Barack Obama] has kept his demeanor, kept his temperament and has shown a power to inspire. I see what energy that he has inspired among the young. Well, it inspires us old goats too.
David McCullough
You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.
David McCullough
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
I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene
David McCullough
I don't pick my presidents because they were great presidents. I'm not much interested in ranking presidents and who is the best and who is the worst. I am much more inclined to be interested in them if they had an interesting life and if they were a complete person - and by that I mean they also had flaws and failings.
David McCullough
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
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
David McCullough
Nobody ever lived in the past.
David McCullough
Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.
David McCullough
People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.
David McCullough
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
I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work - found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.
David McCullough
Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
David McCullough
There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans
David McCullough
Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.
David McCullough
My wife, the star I steer by.
David McCullough
The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.
David McCullough
I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
David McCullough
You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
David McCullough