David McCullough

David Gaub McCullough (7 July 1933 – 7 August 2022) was an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' highest civilian awards.

Quotes

 * Novelists talk about their characters starting to do things they didn’t expect them to. Well, I imagine every writer of biography or history, as well as fiction, has the experience of suddenly seeing a few pieces of the puzzle fit together. The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote — though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new — but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.
 * As quoted in "David McCullough, The Art of Biography No. 2" by Elizabeth Gaffney & Benjamin Ryder Howe, in The Paris Review, Issue 152 (Fall 1999)


 * On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.
 * The Wright Brothers (2015), Epilogue

Disputed

 * Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.