There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

I would pay to do what I do if I had to.

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.

May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?

There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

People are so helpful. People will stop what theyre doing to show you something to walk with you through a section of the town or explain how a suspension bridge really works.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

About the only time losing is more fun than winning is when you're fighting temptation.

Do not worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older it will avoid you.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.

Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

By and large the United States has been able to resist the temptation to close its doors to the world.

Why resist temptation? There will always be more.

Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colors that are but skin-deep.

Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue.

You oughtn't to yield to temptation. Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd.

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.

Let's remember the children who come from broken homes, surrounded by crime, drugs, temptation, their peers having babies out of wedlock, but who still manage to get a good education despite the many obstacles they face every day.

Knowledge of God's Word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

Some are wrong because they are not strong enough to fight temptation and some some are wrong because they do not know.