Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

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

What I try to do - and I think this is the former librarian in me - is to get primary source material.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

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

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

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.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.

We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.

I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.

I loved math and science. It just made sense to me. But my hatred for world history has come to bite me in the butt in my adult years. Every show I have done professionally has required me to study the world in which my characters lived.

I like historical things; I like researching things.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

I did a history degree once.

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.

So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

History is an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs

I've always been fascinated by history.

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.

History is sometimes hard. We study it and try to discover facts.