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Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.

The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.