Bill Buford Quotes

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

Once you find what you like, it's like it worked yesterday, it works today, it'll work tomorrow.

A cello was there 400 years ago and will still be here in 400 years.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.

The game was here long before I was, and will be here long after I'm gone.

I recently reread an article of mine written in 1964, and I think it is still valid. There is not much difference. Many of the items on the agenda 37 years ago are still there.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

I'm always happy to be a part of history. When you're a part of history, you live forever. 'The T.A.M.I. Show' will live forever because now it's brand new. We did that 40-odd years ago, and people are really starting to see it now. I was a part of history when I recorded that show.

History is not was. It is.

History didn't begin yesterday.

The times demand not a man bearing promises of new things, but a man who can finish the things begun...

I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

I think about Shakespeare. Because there have been hundreds of variations of Shakespeare's plays since they've been written, and I believe it's because they're important. They're still relevant today. 'Roots' is still relevant today. The idea that we shouldn't tell this story again is very strange to me.

We didn't invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever.

Only the very best clubs are able to pass the baton of continuity down through the generations.

If a thing is old, it is a sign that it was fit to live. Old families, old customs, old styles survive because they are fit to survive. The guarantee of continuity is quality. Submerge the good in a flood of the new, and good will come back to join the good which the new brings with it. Old-fashioned hospitality, old-fashioned politeness, old-fashioned honor in business had qualities of survival. These will come back.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

I guess some things never change.

I guess that's the thing about Rome: It never changes.

Institutions do live on their history.

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.