Top 100 History Of Writing Quotes
#1. There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#2. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
Gail Carriger
#3. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#5. If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Terry Eagleton
#6. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#8. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#10. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#12. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.
Barack Obama
#13. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
A.A. Milne
#14. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.
John Dos Passos
#15. 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
#16. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
Megan Smith
#17. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#18. The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.
Stephen King
#19. 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
#20. The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.
Earle Birney
#21. History is the roadmap to a better tomorrow. Destroying it is getting rid of any chance of what not to do for future generations.
Jason E. Hodges
#22. The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
Marshall McLuhan
#23. It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#24. I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.
Imre Kertesz
#25. History, like memories themselves, tended to become distorted with the passing of time, or worse, corrupted with the agendas of those writing it.
Terry Goodkind
#26. Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain.
Ani DiFranco
#27. The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.
Edmund Morgan
#28. One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.
Michael Bywater
#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. I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write ...
Wilhelm Steinitz
#31. Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.
Sheryl Crow
#32. I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life.
Vincent Piazza
#33. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
Carl Lotus Becker
#34. I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.
Garth Greenwell
#35. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#36. I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..
Willem De Kooning
#37. It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.
Helen Keller
#38. Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Charles Kettering
#39. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#40. People are reading. In fact, due to social media they are reading more than any time in history. Now we must find a way to get them to include books in all that reading. It starts with us writers doing a better job of writing.
Will Gibson
#41. My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
Lynn Abbey
#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. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
#44. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#45. Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
#46. I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.
David Talbot
#48. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
Bertrand Russell
#49. I've always viewed history as my personal treasure chest.
Sara Sheridan
#50. I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.
Alison Weir
#51. Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.
Matthew Stewart
#52. History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.
Breyten Breytenbach
#53. I will write on the pages of history what I want them to say. I will be myself. I will speak my own name.
Maya Angelou
#54. In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.
Thomas Sydenham
#55. 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
#56. For every written history, there is a silenced part of it, that is left to remain untold and undiscovered until history repeats itself.
Joon Mier Da Mienta
#57. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
#58. The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
Natasha Trethewey
#59. Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
#60. We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
Richard Marius
#61. Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
#62. In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely.
Laura Hillenbrand
#63. Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.
Wendy Rose
#64. I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#65. Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Joss Whedon
#66. The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#67. No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
David McCullough
#68. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#69. With the possible exception of God during the writing of the Bible, every writer in history has needed an editor. So do you.
Donald Davis
#70. History makes my mouth water - and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.
Sara Sheridan
#71. Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.
Sara Sheridan
#72. I'm not a method actor, I don't write my character's history or all those kinds of things. I'm more about the 90 percent of the brain that is subconscious. I like to just pick certain pieces, let it soak in, and then let it kind of emerge out.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
#73. Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
Gordon S. Wood
#74. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
#75. Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#76. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
Carolyn Kizer
#77. Two thousand years ago, in the Middle East, an event occurred that permanently changed the world. Because of that event, history was split. Every time you write a date, you're using the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the focal point.
Rick Warren
#78. History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.
Peter Adejimi
#79. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
David Letterman
#80. Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
#81. Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#82. there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.
Robert Graves
#83. This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.
Will Leitch
#84. We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words' ...
Janet Frame
#85. When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.
Sarah Parcak
#86. I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
David McCullough
#88. What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.
Jim Bishop
#89. Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.
H.G.Wells
#90. Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
Lord Acton
#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. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
#93. 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
#94. Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt.
Simon Van Booy
#95. Shakespeare in Love ... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent.
Anita Diament
#96. What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.
August Wilson
#97. Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.
George F. Kennan
#99. I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time.
Michel Faber
#100. We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
Sara Sheridan
