Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.
I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
I'm so optimistic, I'd go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.
If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.
There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.
Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.
Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.
Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.
Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live.
When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.
I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.
Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.
'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality.
When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you are going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce.
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
'Baltimore' the series is inspired by all kinds of things, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Dracula.'
In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.
Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale... from hell's heart I stab at thee.
