Top 100 History Is Fiction Quotes
#1. Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#3. Ari: The serial number was now my new name. I was dehumanized. I was branded like an animal, but was treated worse. This is what racism can do to people.
Christopher Huh
#4. One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.
Matthew Pearl
#5. History is about ordinary people living their ordinary lives, just as we do today, while all around the world is changing. It makes heroes out of some people and victims out of others.
Vicky Adin
#6. History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
Amy Waldman
#7. I am not a fiction reader. If I already do, I read fiction always more like the illustration of a philosophical-political thesis than a novel. My preference is history. If one does not know history, he is condemned to relive it.
Louis Tobback
#8. Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
A.A. Gill
#9. I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
Miguel Syjuco
#15. What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
Matthew Pearl
#16. Kindness is not something you are born with; it's a way in which you choose to be.
Lisa Kaye Presley
#17. Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.
George R R Martin
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Culture is the best society has to offer...How can we pass on civilization to those who do not value civilization. (Terrence Rattigan)
Beth Fine
#21. 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
#22. I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
Kate Mosse
#23. There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.
Allen Ginsberg
#24. Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history.
Helen McCloy
#25. 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
#26. Most of the history is a divine work of fiction.
Kedar Joshi
#27. My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
Daniel Goldstein
#28. We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.
Julian Barnes
#29. History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.
A.E. Samaan
#30. If you put forth a small amount of effort, you just might find your next best friend for life is of a different race than your own.
Ted Harts
#31. Between the sands of time is a multitude of truths untold.
Jason E. Royle
#32. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture.
Olaf Stapledon
#33. Hell is full of polite men with bone saws.
Miles Watson
#34. The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.
Philippa Gregory
#35. All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.
Voltaire
#36. What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer ... from a thousand questions?
G.F. Smith
#37. We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.
Saul David
#38. The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
Oscar Wilde
#39. We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#40. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L'Amour
#41. For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.
Hilary Mantel
#42. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.
Claude Calame
#43. A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.
Pamela Sargent
#44. While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.
Sara Sheridan
#45. If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?
Ryan Goodrich
#46. Every hundred years or so a new Grim Anoukie is made; the Parish Priest at the time picks a victim, usually someone who has pissed off the church or simply wouldn't be missed. He then buries them alive in the Virgin Grave; the rest is... history."
Nicky Peacock
"The Virgin Grave
Nicky Peacock
#47. Watson fully comprehended the fact that occasionally it is useful for one's adversaries to underestimate one's abilities."
~Sherlock Holmes
Stephanie Osborn
#48. I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men - even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses.
K. Lee Lerner
#49. Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.
Salman Rushdie
#50. I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.
Marilynne Robinson
#51. Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
Denise Mina
#52. 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
#53. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
Michael J. Findley
#54. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
Joseph Conrad
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
O. Henry
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
Joan Robinson
#68. History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.
Voltaire
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Jewish history is never simply about the Jews, but always about their relationship with the rest of society.
Abigail Green
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. In other words, that works of history are mere collections of facts. It is fiction alone that can show us the true nature of human beings
Daisaku Ikeda
#79. 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
#80. True history," said Hearst, with a smile that was, for once, almost charming, "is the final fiction. I thought even you knew that.
Gore Vidal
#81. There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.
James D'arcy
#82. Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.
Harry Turtledove
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.
Helen Cam
#87. History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.
Peter Singer
#88. 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
#89. [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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#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. < ... > 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
#95. 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
#96. History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.
Edna O'Brien
#97. The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
#98. Fiction is the history of the obscure.
Jill Lepore
#99. History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.
Jules De Goncourt
#100. 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
