Muḥammad ibn Abī Ḥātim said, “I heard Abū ʿAbd Allāh remark, ‘I did not sleep last night until I had counted how many reports I had incorporated into my compilations; they came to roughly two hundred thousand hadiths with full chains of transmission.’

I also heard him say, ‘I have never written down an anecdote; I always committed it to memory.’

And I heard him say, ‘I compiled the book al-Iʿtiṣām in a single night.’

I further heard him say, ‘I know of nothing people require except that it is found in the Book and the Sunnah.’

I asked him, ‘Is it really possible to know all of that?’ He replied, ‘Yes.’ (1)

I heard him relate: ‘When I was in Nīshāpūr, I would sit in the congregational mosque. ʿAmr ibn Zurārah and Isḥāq ibn Rāhwayh went to Yaʿqūb ibn ʿAbd Allāh, the governor of Nīshāpūr, and informed him of my presence. He excused himself to them, saying, “Our practice is that when someone unknown is reported to us, we detain him until his situation becomes clear.”

Someone then said to him, “I have heard that he told you, ‘You do not perform the prayer properly; how, then, can you presume to sit (in authority)?’”

He answered, “Had anything of that sort been said to me, I would not have left that session until I had narrated ten thousand hadiths—on prayer alone.”’