A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Quote Topics

Based Century Coffin Culture Great Hart His Joseph Melville Nantucket Novel Quaker Read Readers Research Were

Quote Author

Nathaniel Philbrick
American - Author
Born: June 11, 1956

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'

Nathaniel Philbrick

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.

Nick Tosches

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

Mark Kurlansky

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

Spencer Boldman

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

Gabrielle Zevin

Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting.

Sylvester Stallone

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.

Noam Chomsky

We all have inherited so many types of fears, whether they're race-based, culture-based, gender-based, age-based, family-based. And then we get comfortable with these fears.

Hill Harper

I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!

Gary Paulsen

For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.

David Liss

For me when I was growing up, some of the happiest times were when we went to a small island called Nantucket off Massachusetts.

Gwyneth Paltrow

'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.

John Burnside

James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave.

Justin Cartwright

A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors