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" The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible. "

Simon Schama

Thought

World

Research

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

" The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. "

" If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me from Norman, Oklahoma, I certainly will go. "

Simon Schama

Say

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well. "

Simon Schama

Egypt

Endurance

" 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. "

" Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. "

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

" 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

" The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. "

" We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. "

" The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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