As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

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.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested.

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men ? or about women ? is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. "I'm content with the same old piece of wood," he said. "I just want to find another place to pound a nail?.?.?. Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred." If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren't sacred, then nobody's songs are sacred. Nobody's. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, "Thank God I didn't make that song. Thank God I didn't make that piece of art. Thank God I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world." Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I'm writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad's bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn't kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.

"Please welcome Professor Varen Nethers, famous depressed dead poets historian and author of the bestselling books