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We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 4
Historian
Journalist
Political Scientist
Brooklyn
New York
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Life
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More quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin
I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The value that I found in interviewing was for an educational experience, just to know that history itself is subjective, that you can't say, It happened. Do the best you can with what you think happened, but a lot of other people are going to see it happening differently.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Perhaps no American family-with the possible exception of the Adams family-has had a more vivid and powerful impact on the life of their times. But the Kennedy tale-the spiral compound of glory, achievement, degradation and almost mythical tragedy-exerts a fascination upon us that goes beyond their public achievements.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.
Doris Kearns Goodwin