Simon winchester

“The very name Impressionism is taken from an Atlantic Ocean painting - that of Monet, of sunrise in the harbor of Le…

— Simon winchester

My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn't give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing…

— Simon Winchester

“or of oats (“ a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”),”

— Simon Winchester

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting…

— Simon Winchester

I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was…

— Simon Winchester

We should all live in central or southwest Queensland in Australia, which is geologically stable. Or Kansas or Nebraska, because it's relatively…

— Simon Winchester

“The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly…

— Simon Winchester

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can…

— Simon Winchester

“and his youngest sister, Henrietta, lived to a great age, also beside the sea, with a vast collection of cats—having previously traveled…

— Simon Winchester

I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects…

— Simon Winchester

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the…

— Simon Winchester

“The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today—Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia—even though the part that the very…

— Simon Winchester

“Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.”

— Simon Winchester

So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep…

— Simon Winchester

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are…

— Simon Winchester

Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about…

— Simon Winchester

“Sophisticated human beings were on hand to see this volcano's convulsions, they were able to investigate the event, and they were able…

— Simon Winchester

Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn't really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux.

— Simon Winchester

We associate the North Atlantic with cod. The motto of Newfoundland used to be 'In cod we trust.' It was a joke,…

— Simon Winchester

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what…

— Simon Winchester

“An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford…

— Simon Winchester

We kid ourselves that we're trying to be empathetic with the human condition from a distance, but I don't think that is…

— Simon Winchester

Why do we as a people choose to live in beautiful and risky places? Beautiful places are relatively dangerous; the forces that…

— Simon Winchester

I've come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target.

— Simon Winchester

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the…

— Simon Winchester