SIMON SCHAMA

I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.

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

I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.

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.

I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.

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

In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

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 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.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

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.

Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are.

St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't.

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.

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.

You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess.

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.

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

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.

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.

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

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.