Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes

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

“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.”

“In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.”

“Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution.”

“I am an avid fisherman, and my daily schedule is to write in the morning and then go fishing in the afternoon. In Maine, I fish mostly for stripers, and in the Florida Keys, I go after all kinds of game fish.”

“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 started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.”

“You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off.”

“remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.”

“Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain.”