Alexander Chee Quotes

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

My research process doesn't vary much. I do a little reading to establish a timeline and decide how I'm going to approach the story.

Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They're often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author's research, a joyful, geeky abyss.

All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.

Research is a lifelong occupation so it's hard to factor it in, but I reckon most books take 5 months from start to finish.

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

As a journalist I'm comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

I think fondly of the rabbit holes I disappeared down when I researched papers for history and English because I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, or because I had to go through so much material to find examples for my thesis.

I'm not a huge fan of research, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you realize you don't know anything.

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

I found with my students they don't necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what's relevant to what's he doing you see.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I'd give the librarian a secret code word and he'd give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.

The research. It is always the best part of writing. And, of course, it is the great excuse to travel.

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski", and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets.

I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.