Top 100 Historical Novel Quotes
#1. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Susanna Kearsley
#2. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.
Martha Grimes
#3. I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.
Colum McCann
#4. I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.
Hannah Kent
#5. Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.
Jim Crace
#6. My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
Eleanor Catton
#7. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
#8. I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.
Lynn Coady
#9. The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.
Eric Sloane
#10. I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.
Hari Kunzru
#11. The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history ... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel ...
Jose Emilio Pacheco
#12. If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.
Nancy Horan
#13. The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.
Mary Pope Osborne
#14. If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
Louis L'Amour
#15. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
George R R Martin
#16. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#17. If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.
Louis L'Amour
#18. Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.
Sharon Kay Penman
#19. Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly ... Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.
Marissa Piesman
#20. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
Hilary Mantel
#21. Do not fret, my brother, my child. For the buffalo will roam the plains once more.
P.J. Parker
#22. I keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves 'Downton Abbey' will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
Julia Quinn
#23. I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#24. I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.
Louis MacNeice
#25. I sincerely pity the poor man you marry. I doubt he'll have a moment's peace.
Heather King
#27. Do you plan on marrying Charles?"
She shook her head.
"Good. I wouldn't want to shoot him, but I would."
... Finding Promise
Scarlett Dunn
#29. There is not a lost piece of yourself that can't be found in a good novel.
Kimberly Jo Smith
#30. I'm an idiot for trying to avoid these feelings because they have caused me pain in the past.
Kellyn Roth
#31. One should learn to connect the bridge between the heart and the mind. That's what crowns you with eternity, and makes you the master of your own life rather than a slave of someone else's.
Iva Kenaz
#32. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. The virtuous are among the the weakest and quickest to sin
Aziz Hamza
#34. For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.
Andrew Sean Greer
#35. Nothing good in this world comes free! For everything there's a payment of time or money or soul!
Kellyn Roth
#36. A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
Edward Hirsch
#37. (The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)
Nancy B. Brewer
#38. Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
Hilary Mantel
#39. If Miss Elton spoke water instead of words, then there would have been a repetition of Noah's flood.
Kellyn Roth
#40. If queens did not exist, the poets would have had to invent them, so necessary as they are to a nation's glory.
Lise Arin
#41. I know you do not think very highly of me, but in some circles, I'm quite the thing.
Jessie Clever
#42. In my end lies my beginning" Who said that? Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542-1587).
Danny Saunders
#43. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.
Shiree McCarver
#44. Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending ... you're still enthralled.
(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
Hilary Mantel
#45. The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.
Erik Larson
#46. Father has taught me that when something is lost, whether dear or not, giving up the search is sometimes best and often enough the lost article finds its owner.
Cassandra Krivy Hirsch
#47. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
#48. Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilised than this gang on the sauce.
Naomi Wood
#49. It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.
Ayn Rand
#51. I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.
Irvin D. Yalom
#52. As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor ... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.
Mary Renault
#53. If the gods chose Sextus as King of Rome, the worst possible evil will befall it
Aziz Hamza
#54. You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Alfred Bester
#55. I refuse to believe the people of Texas and all Americans in the world have forgotten us.
P.J. Parker
#56. When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.
Tim Pratt
#57. Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
- Winston S. Churchill
Ellen Brazer
#58. when you walk the path of revenge, know that someone will always follow your trail
Aziz Hamza
#59. What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. Such
Leo Tolstoy
#60. This is a time of change," the Shaman said. "This is a time of enormous power.
P.J. Parker
#61. Yessir, some things is sin 'cause God says so. Some things is sin 'cause they hurt other people. And some things is just pure-dee stupid.
David Hopper
#62. She is my friend, and there is nothing you can say or do that can stop me from helping her.
Peter G. Nogel
#63. 'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.
Pamela Sargent
#64. A voice yelled after me but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone's nightmare.
Sarah Dunant
#65. Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time.
Samuel R. Delany
#66. I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.
Rachel Kushner
#67. Discourses, which are mostly wrapped in spurious religious and patriotic ideologies that ignite the enthusiasm of the ignorant masses
Aziz Hamza
#68. Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.
Kellyn Roth
#70. Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.
Janette Turner Hospital
#72. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#73. History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.
Aziz Hamza
#74. Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.
Rachel Kushner
#75. I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
Deborah Harkness
#76. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.
Malcolm Blair-Robinson
#77. However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
Helen Dunmore
#78. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.
P.J. Parker
#79. Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet?
P.J. Parker
#80. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.
P.J. Parker
#81. Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?
Jerome Charyn
#82. The early morning sunshine shot up the ice-covered valley. It glinted off the backs of slumbering mastodon, reflected between the antlers of caribou.
P.J. Parker
#83. I brought you something. It's my sister's coat. It
gets cold in Nashville in the wintertime.
Nancy B. Brewer
#85. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
Julia Alvarez
#86. Skip your fancy talk, Captain Lord Blackthorn. If I do your bidding, and I'm still discussing that with the Almighty, it will only be to save my arse." Katie O'Reilly to Captain Lord Jack Blackthorn in "Titanic Rhapsody
Jina Bacarr
#87. The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman
Lisa Barr
#88. I've seen enough cowboys in my life to know I don't want one for a husband."
...Victoria
"Every good man I know is a cowboy."
Scarlett Dunn
#89. We must love our slaves, Papa. We must love them as hard as we are able.
P.J. Parker
#90. For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I've always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!
Asaad Almohammad
#92. He was wearing a little bag of "Mojo" around his neck.
Nancy B. Brewer
#93. I've never met anyone as kind as you are, except me Mum, o' course." --Benjamin Trimmel to Lady Alexandra.
Lisa M. Prysock
#94. West Point - The Key to the Continent and Independence.
P.J. Parker
#95. It is said you are the woman who holds all of London in the palm of her hand."
"Perhaps not all of London, Your Grace, but a fortunate few have indeed felt the palm of my hand.
Joanna Shupe
#96. We the People . . . The People of the Long House.
P.J. Parker
#97. We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering?
P.J. Parker
#99. I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#100. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.
P.J. Parker
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