Zadie Smith Quotes

She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.

I cannot get over the fact that I was born in 1944. I want to find out as much as I can about that year.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.