Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

I have a huge passion for literature.

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

I read a lot of articles about young women in the resistance. All of a sudden, I felt that if I go too much into this horror, then I won't be able to start as a fresh character.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

The doll, Dallas. You know, Barbie doll. Jeez, didn't you ever have dollies?" "Dolls are like small dead people. I have enough dead people, thanks.

It's Aslan, the lion from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. It's a symbol of my hellish childhood. I struggled through my oppressive teenage years and when I turned 18 I escaped. Like Aslan I was finally free.

The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie.