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" I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor. "
Simon Schama
Old
Inevitable
I Am
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" The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power. "
Simon Schama
Bible
Religion
Now
" St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't. "
Simon Schama
Christian
Early
Impossible
" At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn. "
Simon Schama
Out
Ugly
Thought
" A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin. "
Simon Schama
Memory
Human
History
" The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence. "
Simon Schama
Spring
Truth
Life
" The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. "
Simon Schama
Moving
True
Bible
" In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation. "
Simon Schama
Believe
Universe
Nature
" I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference. "
Simon Schama
Thought
Myself
Best
" Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers. "
Simon Schama
Someone
Quality
Your
" I was conscious of being wordy as a child. I was a terrible talker. I memorised the Latin names of flowers at five; I was shown off as a freak. My father encouraged me to be wordier than I was: he'd been a street orator at the time of Mosley, and his ideal primary concert speech was Henry V's speech before Harfleur. "
Simon Schama
Father
Speech
Flowers
" I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor. "
Simon Schama
Write
Repair
Study
" The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history. "
Simon Schama
Document
Social
Riches
" Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family. "
Simon Schama
Food
Home
Place
" I am passionately invested in the survival of Israel and everything Israel represents. But I am extremely critical of much of its policy. I believe that the occupation must end. And if it doesn't, it will end Israel. I'm not in favor of settlements. "
Simon Schama
I Believe
End
Believe
" I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury. "
Simon Schama
Need
Arts
More
" Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. "
Simon Schama
Live
Country
Different
" Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between. "
Simon Schama
Adventure
Living
Story
" In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics. "
Simon Schama
Politics
Faith
Early
" The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too. "
Simon Schama
Early
Around
Late
" I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected. "
Simon Schama
History
People
Think
" America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words. "
Simon Schama
God
America
Great
" Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish. "
Simon Schama
Together
Religion
Freedom
" The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. "
Simon Schama
Much
Modern
Art
" The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church. "
Simon Schama
You
Church
Religion
" Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be. "
Simon Schama
Jews
Forced
Unless
" By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe. "
Simon Schama
Stereotype
Ugly
End
" The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication. "
Simon Schama
Extraordinary
Story
Jewish
" The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story. "
Simon Schama
Bible
History
Nature
" Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry. "
Simon Schama
Poetry
Start
Feel
" History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel. "
Simon Schama
You
History
Poetry