Top 100 History Fiction Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river.
Mark Twain
#7. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#12. When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.
David McCullough
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#16. 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
#17. Most of the fiction on the California Gold Rush makes it sound like one grand, boyish adventure. However, when you read the real history, you realize that it wasn't that way at all.
Laurence Yep
#18. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#22. History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.
Aziz Hamza
#23. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#24. Jewish history is never simply about the Jews, but always about their relationship with the rest of society.
Abigail Green
#25. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#26. For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
#27. 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
#28. I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.
Charles De Lint
#29. I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.
Sara Sheridan
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?
Tad Williams
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.
Voltaire
#37. There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
Joan Robinson
#38. I want to be undone by you. I want to be the one to come to pieces in your arms, to forget there is anything in this world but the two of us.
Laura Andersen
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the and and lead us into that world.
Judith Geary
#42. Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
Terry Eagleton
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
Tananarive Due
#47. Shitting fucking bastard! Fuck off you massive cockwank!' - Misty Meanor, during a particularly stressful encounter.
Matthew Sylvester
#48. 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
#49. Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet's eyes and recounted in a poet's terms.
Frank Herbert
#51. Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.
Jared Diamond
#52. I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
Isabel Allende
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
O. Henry
#59. 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
#60. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
Siri Hustvedt
#62. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
Joseph Conrad
#63. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.
R. Curtis Venture
#64. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
Michael J. Findley
#65. He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.
Nadeem Aslam
#67. History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill
Ron Mayes
#68. 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
#69. It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
Raymond Queneau
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.
Jules De Goncourt
#74. Fiction is the history of the obscure.
Jill Lepore
#75. The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
#76. History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.
Edna O'Brien
#77. They would never forget the war. The world wouldn't let them, and neither would history.
Lee Strauss
#78. It's history as it should have happened. It's history made better.
R.A. McCandless
#79. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
Eleanor Antin
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. Here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.
Anne Burack Sayre
#89. History becomes fiction in the ... act of being written down
Jack Kerouac
#90. < ... > 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
#91. She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.
Nancy B. Brewer
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
