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" 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. "

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" I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and get on with the next job. "

Simon Schama

Curse

I Am

Job

" I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory. "

" 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. "

" Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be. "

" My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God. "

" Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. "

" 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. "

" The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history. "

" It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me. "

" The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios. "

" As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied. "

" 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. "

" I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me. "

Simon Schama

Sense

Always

" Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms. "

" From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. "

" The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication. "

" You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body. "

Simon Schama

America

Body

" I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled. "

Simon Schama

Stylish

New

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for. "

Simon Schama

Great

Children