Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

I'm not a Lincoln expert, rather a biographer who has had the pleasure of reading much of what has been written about him from his lifetime to this year of his bicentennial. Some advice: Don't try that unless you have at least five years available.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it's the bicentennial of his birth. I've known a lot about the Civil War, but I'm just getting more into it.

I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story.