History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
Real success is finding you lifework in the work that you love.
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.
I would pay to do what I do if I had to.
When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.
I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.
The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?
May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.
There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.
The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.
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.
