I would pay to do what I do if I had to.

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

I would pay to do what I do if I had to.

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.

May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

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

I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works.

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

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

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?

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

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

People are so helpful. People will stop what theyre doing to show you something to walk with you through a section of the town or explain how a suspension bridge really works.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

A real Bond girl wears so many skill hats...costumes are more like casual chic code

We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, 'Can I have the torch?' It seems to fall flat when I say, 'Can I have the flashlight?'

I can't disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses - the wheelchair gives me away.

At Brit + Co, our mission is to unlock creativity, so we look for future employees that actively flex their creative muscles. The design of your resume is the first way to let me know more about your aesthetic.

I'm not eager at all to present my life out there for public consumption. I like to do one or two films a year and then do what is absolutely obligatory in terms of promoting them. My life outside of films is vital to me.

Dig your well before you're thirsty.

According to the Social Security Administration, in 1945, 41.9 workers supported each individual retiree, while today only 3.3 workers support each retiree. This system cannot continue.

The redemption plot is one of the oldest story shapes.

Judging is a lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.

You can and should set your own limits and clearly articulate them. This takes courage, but it is also liberating and empowering, and often earns you new respect.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

Pleasure is the flower that passes remembrance the lasting perfume.

'Project Runway' was my guilty pleasure while my son was napping or nursing.

Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.

The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.

Middle class families should not be forced to scrape by with less while oil companies get away with more.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web weve realized its a brochure.

We know what happens to little black boys that have no dads; we've heard that, we get it. But no one is really saying that young women who are born without fathers have real serious issues especially when their mother had no father and the mother has issues.

If classical music is the state of the art then the arts are in a sad state.