Historical Recording Quotes

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine?

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

I think nothing has been filmed as much as World War II.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

I wanted to write history rather than participate in it.

The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.

I called it 'Historian' because I feel like most of my creative efforts are efforts to capture something or to document it.

Among intellectual pursuits, one of the most useful is the recording of past events.