David McCullough Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Century

• My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like, Book

• 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

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Help

• Real success is finding you lifework in the work that you love.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Life, Love, Success, Work

• 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?

  David McCullough

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Human

• 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.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Mind

• There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Research

• 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.

  David McCullough

  Topics in College, Life

  Tags in People

• When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Research

• You can’t be a full participant in our democracy if you don’t know our history.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Democracy, History

• 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.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Read

• 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.

  David McCullough

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Like

David McCullough (32)

Birth:	7th July, 1933
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Historian, Lecturer

About

David Gaub McCullough was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. He earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood. McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams, have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a mini-series, respectively. He was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993.

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