Latest Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Integrity, Writing, Looks

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• I think the most important advice is, a person doesn't have to find out right away. It's not like their first attempt at finding a profession is the only one they're going to find. I might well have gone down other paths, and it still might have been okay. But if you find something that you love, and if it keeps deepening with each new experience, then just stay with it.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, New Experiences, Advice

  Source: www.achievement.org

• If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Views, People, Dimensions

  Source: www.achievement.org

• The value that I found in interviewing was for an educational experience, just to know that history itself is subjective, that you can't say, "It happened." Do the best you can with what you think happened, but a lot of other people are going to see it happening differently.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Educational, Thinking, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

• When I do research, I have done - 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don't have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Writing, Faces, Looks

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I think that's still what the American Dream means: that with perseverance, with hard work, you can become something, that the classes won't prevent you from becoming, that there's a movement up that ladder with hard work.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Dream, Perseverance, Hard Work

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I think if I were reading to a grandchild, I might read Tolstoy's War and Peace. They would learn about Russia, they would learn about history, they would learn about human nature. They would learn about, "Can the individual make a difference or is it great forces?" Tolstoy is always battling with those large issues. Mostly, a whole world would come alive for them through that book.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  War, Reading, Book

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• I keep thinking that history runs in cycles, and that some day certain large issues will come before the country again. There will be leaders that inspire young people. I don't think it means that it's over forever, but I'm getting pretty impatient. I'm hoping it comes soon, so that my young people can know that experience that we knew in the '60s, and that the World War II generation knew during the '40s.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Country, Running, War

• What the American Dream means to me is the fact that - what founded this country - when I think about those posters that were put up in Europe, which said, "Come to America and you'll have golden sidewalks. The land will be yours." There was something so inspirational about the fact that these immigrants from all over the world felt that here was a place of freedom, a place of opportunity.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Country, Dream, Mean

  Source: www.achievement.org

• The one thing that John Kennedy did, above all else, was to energize young people to feel that they wanted to give something to their country. I just hope, for young people of this generation, that they'll experience that feeling once again, that by working on large goals, they can do something more than their own individual ambition.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Country, Ambition, People

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievemnt Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you're in some common mission together. You have to hope it's not going to take a war to bring that back to America again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  War, Thinking, America

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• When I look at Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, Born, Wells

  Source: www.achievement.org

• What I learned, more than anything, was that you can't have it all balanced perfectly at any one time. When I was young, it was much more balanced toward work. When I had my children, it was much more balanced toward love and family, and I didn't get a lot of work done. So you can't ask of it to be perfectly balanced at any time, but your hope is, before you die, you've somehow had each of those spheres come to life. That's probably more important than success in any one of those spheres alone.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Children, Important, Spheres

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• One of the important qualities that I think is often overlooked is just energy. It's vitality, and sort of a life force that some people have and others don't. Probably that is connected to a love of whatever it is that they're doing. Another quality that I think is central is confidence. Again, some people are more blessed with that than others.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Blessed, Thinking, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

• Sometimes people will find things that are wrong. Sometimes they will even find an approach that you took wrong. If you think you took the right approach, then you just absorb the criticism, but you don't change your mind.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, People, Mind

  Source: www.achievement.org

• As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, Doing You, Research

  Source: www.achievement.org

• What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. If you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, Long, Perfect

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievemnt, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

• You can't start out at 20 in whatever your profession is and say, "I want to win an Olympic medal," or "I want to become president," or "I want to win the Pulitzer Prize." If you love what you're doing, it's sort of a nice thing that happens toward the end of your career, or in the middle of your career. It is not the reason you were doing it. The reason you were doing it is because every day you wake up in the morning and you can't wait to learn something new.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Morning, Nice, Winning

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.achievement.org

• When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, Winning, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

• There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Book, Writing, Research

  Source: www.achievement.org

• The White House is such an extraordinary, simple, beautiful place. It's an extraordinary piece of our history, because it is the one thing that binds our country together. We don't have a king obviously, but we have this president, and the fact that almost all of them have lived in the same place, and so much history took place in those rooms. You can't help but feel awe-inspired by being there.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Beautiful, Country, Kings

• I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Sorry, Kids, Home

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I think the most important thing I wanted to say at various times to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt was that it seemed so sad to me that - I really believe they loved each other and had a great deal of affection - but because of that early hurt in their marriage, there was a certain kind of distance from then on, until their deaths actually. So at times, I just wanted to push them together and say, "Come on, you guys! I know you love each other. This is crazy!"

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Hurt, Distance, Crazy

  "Lessons of Presidential Leadership". Academy of Achievemnt, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.