12 Quotes & Sayings By Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a British film and television historian, journalist, and academic. He is also a filmmaker and writer of documentary films and books. His television credits include shows for the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, the History Channel, CNN, and many others. His best-selling books include The Embarrassment of Riches (1991), Citizens (1998), Rough Crossings (2004) and more recently The Story of the Jews (2011).

1
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot. Simon Schama
2
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. Simon Schama
3
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story. Simon Schama
4
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well. Simon Schama
5
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. Simon Schama
6
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. Simon Schama
7
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel. Simon Schama
8
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry. Simon Schama
9
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied. Simon Schama
10
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. Simon Schama
11
The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. Simon Schama