To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

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

There's no such thing as a foreseeable future.

I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you?

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.