Fiction And History Quotes

#1. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.

Michael Rogin

#2. . 'Because off-duty cops walk around the city wearing sweatshirts advertising they're cops all the time, never mind it's a hundred degrees outside. And never mind you look like the youngest cop ever recruited in the history of policing.'
He tsks at me. 'Have you never seen 21 Jump Street?

Sarah Alderson

#3. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

Aldous Huxley

#4. I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

Yann Martel

#5. When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

Bill Vaughan

#6. Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.

Donna Tartt

#7. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music

Daniel Aaron

#8. Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Ray Bradbury

#9. History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

Jon Weisman

#10. [Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.

Ali Smith

#11. Even a quick reading of Rizal's trial will prove that those who take Constantino's works uncritically are likewise guilty of "Veneration Without Understanding." Since there is so much fiction and faction in history it is always essential to return to the sources.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#12. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.

Barbara Pym

#13. I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#14. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

Tony Kushner

#15. There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

Don DeLillo

#16. My great-great grandfather and I were the best of friends, although we never met

Raji Singh

#17. 2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history ; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.

Arthur C. Clarke

#18. Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#19. Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.

George R R Martin

#20. History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

Victor Hugo

#21. An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe.

Kelly Steed

#22. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Sarah Moss

#23. I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

Philippa Gregory

#24. I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

Molly Antopol

#25. If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.

Kathleen Rooney

#26. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Valentina Knurova

#27. Humans have been doin' awful things to each other throughout history. Humanity's not as great as you make it out to be. I do what needs to be done, and that's that. We're about to go to war, Earl. There ain't no humanity in war.

Michael Monroe

#28. I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.

Hilary Mantel

#29. They do not call him the terror of husbands and lovers for no reason ...

Andrea Zuvich

#30. Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive," says Ora.

Shaune Bordere

#31. I'm too old to be ignorant as I am."
--Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

Elle Thornton

#32. Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.

Louise Penny

#33. If I write nothing but fiction for some time I begin to get stupid, and to feel rather as if it had been a long meal of sweets; then history is a rest, for research or narration brings a different part of the mind into play.

Charlotte Mary Yonge

#34. I always tell people that if they want to know about the history of a country, do not go to the history books, go to the fiction. Fiction is not fiction. It is the substance and heartbeat of a people's life, here, now, and in the past.

Chenjerai Hove

#35. Never underestimate what teens can understand or do. They're smart, creative, and fresh-minded. I wish I was one.

Brook Tesla

#36. History judged causes' greatness proportionally by how many individuals ,themselves powerless to affect any outcomes of consequence, suffered and died in their service.

Victor Milan

#37. Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction

Hermann Hesse

#38. Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.

Chang-rae Lee

#39. As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

Kate Atkinson

#40. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#41. It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

E. M. Forster

#42. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#43. I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

Kathryn Lasky

#44. Start to focus on things that unite the races of people instead of things that divide us, and you will have already won the battle, and are a building block to the solution.

Ted Harts

#45. Trust wasn't just sharing secrets. It was sharing hurts, fears, and failures. And even though she'd given him her history, she'd yet to let him anywhere near her heart.

Tammy L. Gray

#46. She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

Joe Hill

#47. Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.

George R R Martin

#48. As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

Michelle Richmond

#49. I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

P. J. O'Rourke

#50. In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

Rachel Kushner

#51. History warns us. Legend fascinates us. Imagination drives us. Authors take these and create worlds that entertain, provoke and warn. Ultimately, even fiction is about the Story we all find ourselves in. And history makes sure no one forgets.

Darrick Dean

#52. History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.

Aziz Hamza

#53. The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Anthony Marra

#54. Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

Orhan Pamuk

#55. History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the and and lead us into that world.

Judith Geary

#56. Amelia nodded her head, "That makes perfect sense."
"No is doesn't," jeered Otto.
"Yes, it does," sighed Amelia. "Don't you ever remember anything important?"
"Of course, I remember how many Star Trek seasons there were and when the Three Stooges were born!

Monet Polny

#57. As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

Matthew Pearl

#58. American houses ... ' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?

Zadie Smith

#59. As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

William Gibson

#60. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

Philip Guedalla

#61. I looked up at the wall. My bachelor's degree had been in History. Films like Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had been some of my favorite programs. Could time travel really be possible? This seemed too unreal.

Anna M. Aquino

#62. A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.

Robin Schone

#63. I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.

Colette Freedman

#64. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Robert Staughton Lynd

#65. Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

W. H. Auden

#66. History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

Bill Watterson

#67. I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

Steven Pinker

#68. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Louis L'Amour

#69. Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.

Kimberly Cutter

#70. History has a way of chasing gravity just like water, feeding into other parts of itself to become something else, something larger and grander, until the one pure thing it was no longer exists.

James Anderson

#71. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#72. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

Adam Sisman

#73. There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy

#74. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.

Paul W. Feenstra

#75. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

Nina Sankovitch

#76. I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.

Charles Lamb

#77. Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories.

Susannah Mansfield

#78. She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

Nancy B. Brewer

#79. < ... > this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.

David Brion Davis

#80. Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.

Anne Burack Sayre

#81. I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

Peter Ackroyd

#82. It must have really not liked me, but I can't imagine why, don't say anything Amelia."
Amelia shrugged her shoulders, "It liked me the first time."
Otto smirked, "Well I have no idea why.

Otto Ray And Amelia Raht

#83. One night when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.

Sarah Bower

#84. You are you because you love the way the world looks through your camera. You are you because of the way you love your friends and family. Not because some scar is on your body. That's a part of your history and what helps form what you believe in. not what defines you.

A.M. Willard

#85. Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Sara Sheridan

#86. History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Edward M. Lerner

#87. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.

Eleanor Antin

#88. They would never forget the war. The world wouldn't let them, and neither would history.

Lee Strauss

#89. The history of fan fiction demonstrates how efficient, and effective, women have been at pooling together to get what they want out of their stories. It's been a largely female-driven world.

Sherwood Smith

#90. Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.

Carl Sagan

#91. Funny how often something she'd been so certain she needed turned out not to be a need at all, but a want
when the real 'need' was something else entirely. Something that could only be gained by giving, not by getting.

Tamera Alexander

#92. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Siri Hustvedt

#93. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.

Sefi Atta

#94. I like fiction and the history...Great!

Idelys Izquierdo Laboy

#95. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

O. Henry

#96. Do as you would be done by

Jennifer Dance

#97. There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.

Malorie Blackman

#98. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Edward Rutherfurd

#99. A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement."
~Sherlock Holmes

Stephanie Osborn

#100. Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet's eyes and recounted in a poet's terms.

Frank Herbert