I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.

Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between being a writer and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. You've got to want to write, I say to them, not want to be a writer. The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.

Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.

But then, as far as I know, as far as I've studied or heard or picked up, it seems that this type of thing is a curse against mankind.

I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.