Charles Nicholl > Quotes

“Everything should be doubted and tested before it is held to be true.”
― Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind

“When in doubt, move, even if it's in the wrong direction.”
― Charles Nicholl, The Fruit Palace

“This is the way history happens: it is measured out in days rather than epochs.”
― Charles Nicholl, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street

“It is true that biographical readings of the plays are dangerous, unregulated, prone to sentimentalization. It is absurd to cherry-pick passages of poetry written over more than two decades and infer from them a consistent personal attitude. Lines belong in a dramatic context and in the psychological context of the character who utters them and cannot be taken to reflect Shakespeare's views.”
― Charles Nicholl, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street

“It is a fairly general rule that the picturesque is based on someone else’s inconvenience”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“The cage is empty; the mind has flown.”
― Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind

“Fawcett ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose.”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“Mina Loy’s first impression when she met him [Arthur Cravan] was that he combined the ‘air of a Viking with the repartee of a Victorian charwoman’.”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“liar, stubborn, greedy’. The account finishes with a list of clothing expenses, from which it appears that Salai had been furnished with one cloak, six shirts, three jerkins, four pairs of stockings, one lined doublet, twenty-four pairs of shoes, a cap and some laces, at a total cost of thirty-two lire. Here again one finds the notebooks full of physical presence, and of things – the aniseed gobstoppers, the Turkish leather, the purse on the bed, the little flasks of oil broken on the floor.”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“Fawcett ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose... He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods.”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“frequently found in Leonardo’s notebooks is that of ‘Salai’, which is the nickname (roughly meaning ‘Little Devil’) of his wayward young apprentice Giacomo Caprotti. He joined Leonardo’s Milanese studio in 1490, at the age of ten, and remained with him for nearly thirty years: his companion and confidant, and (on the well-informed testimony of the Milanese painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo) his lover.”
― Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations

“disorder of the river-bed.”
― Charles Nicholl, Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind