A Quote by John Burnside

'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

Quote Topics

Best Best Friend Books Changed Friends Looked Me My Best Friend Read Really Threw Way Were World

Quote Author

John Burnside
Scottish - Writer
Born: March 19, 1955

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

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.

Julius Erving

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

Michael Cunningham

When I go on vacation, I take very few clothes and a whole lot of books. It's the most soothing thing in the world. Reading 'Moby-Dick' is like being in a time machine. I almost feel as excited as the first time I read it and I always find something new.

Nile Rodgers

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

Nathaniel Philbrick

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

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

Chad Harbach

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'

Nathaniel Philbrick

I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Early on I came to realize something, and it came from the mail I received from kids. That is, kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they're still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they feel about the world in general. I don't think that's true of adults as much.

Lois Lowry

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

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.

Garth Risk Hallberg

The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.

Haruki Murakami

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

As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.