Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I don't really think of things in terms of legacy or where I stand in the history of Nintendo or anything like that.

I'm quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia - which may have some things wrong in it but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn't have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think are the most important facts.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner I think if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

If I were beginning my career today I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television and I think if I were beginning today I'd be there.

When you think of how history is revealed we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.