top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Learning quotes
"Reading doesn't mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read."
"In fact, mistakes are life's way of teaching us the right way to do things."
"We often know information but not the epistemology of that information."
"Failure is the school of greatness."
"We are not perfect. We are here to learn. Earth is one big classroom and God is our heavenly guidance counselor and teacher."
"Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own."
"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
Explore more quotes by David McCullough
"First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book."
bottom of page