Daily Inspiration Quote by David McCullough

“I work very hard” is McCullough’s quiet rebuttal to the romantic myth of effortless genius. Coming from a historian who made narrative nonfiction feel as propulsive as a novel, the line is almost a craft manifesto: the real work isn’t just discovering facts, it’s shaping them into something readers can carry.

The tell is that homely word “lumber.” He’s not talking about mistakes so much as dead weight: the dutiful throat-clearing, the overquoted document, the paragraph that proves you did the research but doesn’t serve the story. “Weed out” frames revision as gardening rather than surgery, a steady, patient thinning so the living parts can breathe. That metaphor also smuggles in an ethic. McCullough isn’t chasing flash; he’s defending clarity as a moral choice. If history is meant to be public knowledge rather than a private archive, then excess prose becomes a kind of gatekeeping.

Context matters. McCullough rose in an era when popular history was often dismissed as “middlebrow,” and academic history could drift toward specialized language and inward-facing debates. His career is an argument that accessibility is not a compromise but an achievement purchased through labor. The subtext is respect for the reader: you don’t earn trust by piling on “lumber,” you earn it by cutting until the structure shows. Revision becomes accountability, not just aesthetics.