Top 254 Moby Dick Quotes & Sayings

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

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.

I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.

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.

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

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.

I'd like to play the whale in 'Moby Dick.' If I keep eating, I may end up getting there.

And then Dick called and said, I'm going to do a special called Dick Van Dyke and the other woman, that would be you, because every time I try to check into a hotel with my wife, they look at me as though I'm cheating on Laura.

When I was a kid, I was kind of obsessed with that movie 'Dick Tracy.' Burger King had all this 'Dick Tracy' stuff, and I collected all of it, and I had the posters, and I watched it on a loop.

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.

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

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.

I love Eminem, I love Moby. Why can't we just be friends?

I probably remember more about 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' than Dick Van Dyke does.

Then there are actors my age like Ethan Hawke, he's in 'Moby Dick,' I love his work. I've been lucky. Alfred Molina, he has real class.

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.

I live in a high-rise apartment building, so I just have two cats. They're both pound kitties. One of them, Dick, is an evil, foot-biting cat. When I write a tiger morph, I'm always imagining Dick.

When in doubt, go for the dick joke.

The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'

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.

Performing for Dick Van Dyke once was fun.

I'm so optimistic, I'd go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

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

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

'Baltimore' the series is inspired by all kinds of things, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Dracula.'

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.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

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.

I want to be the black Dick Vitale.

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.

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.

When I started out on 'Min Kamp', I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write something majestic and grand, something like 'Hamlet' or 'Moby Dick,' but found myself with this small life - looking after kids, changing diapers, quarreling with my wife, unable to write anything, really.

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.

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.

Dick Dale don't surf no more.

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.

I don't think anyone could be the next Dick Vitale. I mean that in a good way. More than an announcer, Dick is an ambassador for the game. Dick is in class by himself. Like what he does or not, what he has done to expand the popularity of college basketball is phenomenal.

Dick Vitale always used to say to me, 'Remember, this is an entertainment medium.' People are not tuning in to a game to know how smart you are about basketball; they wanna enjoy it. And it took Dick years of saying that for me to settle in and say, 'It's also okay for me to have a little fun on the air.'

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!

I was obsessed with Philip K. Dick.

Dick Murdoch is a true Hall of Famer.

I'm a huge fan of Philip K. Dick.

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

Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

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.'

Dick Moss, my agent. Dick became my agent in 1979 when I signed my contract with the Houston Astros.

Moby lives the simplest of any person I think I know.

'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.

When I read the 'Dick and Jane' stories, I thought they were afraid they might forget each other's names because they always said each other's names - a lot. So if Jane didn't see the dog, Dick would say, 'Look Jane, look. There is the dog next to Sally, Jane. The dog is also next to mother, Jane. The dog is next to father, Jane.'

Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.

The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.

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.

I dont think I talk to anybody the same way I talk to Moby.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live.

When your Dad was the creator of 'Moby Dick' you kind of steer clear of getting compared in a solo-ing aspect.

I don't think I talk to anybody the same way I talk to Moby.

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.

I remember seeing this picture my mother had of Dick Clark. It didn't inspire me to be an actor or anything, but when I did 'American Dreams' with Dick Clark, my mother came out, and she showed him this picture of them that was taken 35 years earlier. It was great.