James Gleick Quotes

But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

Madame Walker was mythologized like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but I want to show that she was fabulous on her own.

I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.

So today if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it's probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went to the store and bought the look that you both like. So forget it. Just think about all the James Deans and what it means.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture.

Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances

I think [John's Adams] descriptions of the personalities of [Benjamin] Franklin and [Tomas] Jefferson and others were pretty accurate. It is only when he felt he was wronged by them that he lets loose his anger and resentment.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

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

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

I love history. I'm very interested by it and I think it's great to have a movie that brings it alive in a way. It's sort of that romanticized version of it.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then - hoisting onto its back a new world-figure - feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

John Silber said the single longest reference he could find to Abraham Lincoln [in Howard Zinn's History of America ] was two paragraphs. That was Howard Zinn. Would you like to hear how Ronaldus Magnus is portrayed?

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.