To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.