Fred Kaplan Quotes

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

I've been accepted at Cambridge University. I want to study Chinese history and archaeology. I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

It took me longer to write the book on Lincoln than it took to fight the Civil War.

I'm not a Lincoln expert, rather a biographer who has had the pleasure of reading much of what has been written about him from his lifetime to this year of his bicentennial. Some advice: Don't try that unless you have at least five years available.

Wearing all that weight Of learning lightly like a flower.

Education is fundamental to any success. That's your baseboard.

You are not educated if all you have achieved is the study of ten books.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.

This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man's power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

A college degree does not lessen the length of your ears; it only conceals it.

Master's degree in journalism served several purposes. It helped me to break down and understand scripts. And the discipline of getting my master's gave me a certain amount of confidence. I don't think college is the only path, but I enjoyed it and it worked out very well for me. I had some good friends with whom I could get a little crazy, but still be responsible. It was the perfect bridge from living at home to independence. I also love learning. I might have been a professional student and earned a couple of doctorates, if I didn't have to pay bills.

Until the early 90s, when I was working on a project about the idea of free will in American philosophy. I knew that Lincoln had had something to say about "necessity" and "fatalism," and so I began writing him into the book. In fact, Lincoln took over. I wrote instead 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,' in 1999, and I've splitting rails with Mr. Lincoln ever since. If there's a twelve-step process for this somewhere, I haven't found it yet.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

Thou art an heyre to fayre lying, that is nothing, if thou be disinherited of learning, for better were it to thee to inherite righteousnesse then riches, and far more seemly were if for thee to haue thy Studie full of bookes, then thy pursse full of mony.

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.