Ben Schott Quotes
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The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do.
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I spend a lot of time looking at rococo books. And almanacs used to be huge sellers - they were pretty much part of the fabric of life. I thought, this is bizarre, I'd love to buy a book like this, and there isn't one. So I thought, all right then, this could be fun. I'll write an almanac.
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If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.
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I never read articles about my books.
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I follow blogs, particularly all the main political ones - Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Coffee House, Paul Waugh, Iain Martin in the Wall Street Journal, and so on. And some American ones, like the Huffington Post, Gawker, Boing Boing; or Eater and Daily Candy, also American, which are about where to go to eat.
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A great deal of American T.V. viewed on Hulu, which is superb - '30 Rock', for instance, is on very good form.
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I read the papers online, and something usually piques my curiosity - that will then be the baseline of my research for the day.
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The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.
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Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers.
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For me, photography only stopped because I was selling books.
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I have the luxury of getting up quite late, so I hardly ever set an alarm clock.
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I always wanted to be a photographer. While I was at school, I got a lab-monkey holiday job in the darkrooms at the 'Independent.' What they taught me there was: you need to get the whole story in one frame.
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For me, writing is like being taken on a walk by a footnote: It's amazing where you end up.
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I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
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I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.
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The radio's pretty much always on, and I also listen to some American podcasts, such as for 'National Public Radio' and 'Newsweek'.