Robert Draper Quotes

If you really hate George Bush, you don't want to read about his hobbies or that he's nice to his friends or that he's good company at dinner.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don't.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson’s biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It’s first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

The criticism usually goes only to the religious right. 'Bigots,' 'intolerant,' 'hateful' - those labels get slapped on quickly and usually when we are winning debates and scoring points against liberals.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

You're a writer. Make it up.

I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.

I'm writing, I'm using language, I'm using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I've always loved that.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

The pollsters who have telephoners are going to consistently get a lower vote for Donald Trump because the media has attacked him so savagely and so dishonestly that a substantial number of people will not say they're for Trump.

The head of the government ethics ought to be careful, because that person is becoming extremely political. Apparently, may have made a - publicly supported Hillary Clinton as calling out the president with information on Twitter about our disentangle - disentangling of the business over a month ago.

We must learn, and we are gradually learning, how to write history with the help of archaeology.