I think it’s best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They’re dropping some of the masks that they’ve been wearing. There’s a candor.
I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?
Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life. Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.
When I’m reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I’m very fond of mysteries.
I love to go to the places where things happen. I like to walk the walk and see how the light falls and what winter feels like.
Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you’ve ideally and more times than not you’ve come out with a love of learning and that’s what matters above all.
The most interesting people are never perfect.
Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are – the great teachers – and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you’re interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it’s taught.
I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I’d seen in the Library of Congress.
If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that. If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively.
The talent, including the talent for history – and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever – it shouldn’t be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.
I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work – found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.
When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don’t when you’re not writing. It’s a very good way to find out how much you don’t know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don’t know at the moment by writing.
I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
I write on the typewriter. I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that.