He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.