David McCullough Quotes

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.

And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

We don't often talk about the fact that writing is all about rhythm. When you get too up in your head, you can lose a lot of your writing. Sometimes what a writer really needs to do is go dancing.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.