Mary Pilon Quotes

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 writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

Now, I personally enjoy a really good footnote.

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

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.

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

Mostly, research is much more fun than the actual writing.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

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.

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.

All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research.

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.

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

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

Our object in these remarks has been not only to account for the slow progress which has as yet been made by Political Economy, and to suggest means by which its advancement may be accelerated, but also to warn the reader of the nature of the following Treatise.

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

What drove me to do 'Dead Wake' was that after doing the most preliminary of reading and scoping out what kinds of materials might be available in archives and so forth, I realized that this book - the research, the writing - would present me with a rare opportunity to explore to a full extent the potential for suspense in a nonfiction work.

The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.

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

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

History is the shank of the social sciences.