70 Quotes by Simon Winchester

The San Francisco earthquake was not caused by God,

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.

A Crack in the Edge of the World

and the beginning of the beginning of what is now the most populous Islamic state on earth, Indonesia.

This may sound silly, but I attach a little counter to the corner of my computer so I know I have to produce, say, 100,000 words by December. If I'm ahead one day, I take a break; if I'm behind, I keep working.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.

The comparisons to Katrina are numerous and just eerie,

So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you’ve published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, ‘Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.’