Top 46 Quotes About Historical Research
#1. So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.
Nancy Horan
#2. Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
C.V. Wedgwood
#3. Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.
Michael Hirst
#4. I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.
Iris Chang
#5. The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.
Colleen Atwood
#6. No past experience, however rich, and no historical research, however thorough, can save the living generation the creative task of finding their own answers and shaping their own future.
Alexander Gerschenkron
#7. Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.
Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier
#8. Most architects work in studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and historical research were irrelevant.
David Chipperfield
#9. Impact of this makeover has been to significantly impede historical research, and it is one of Ataturk's most devastating accomplishments.
Eric Bogosian
#10. ...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...
William B. Irvine
#11. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.
Lloyd DeMause
#12. I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.
Tim Curry
#13. My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.
Robert Darnton
#15. I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.
Scott Snyder
#16. The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.
Thomas Piketty
#17. If it is impossible to judge merit and guilt in the field of natural science, then it is not possible in any field, and historical research becomes an idle, empty activity.
Justus Von Liebig
#18. You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.
Tony Kushner
#19. All that we may ever hope to establish in historical research are facts and conditions but never causes.
Otto E. Neugebauer
#20. Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars ... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.
Richard Dawkins
#21. With the historical fictions, I was already doing so much research, and so much of the stories was anchored by historical truth that the move to nonfiction didn't feel all that dramatic - just another half-step to the right.
Debra Dean
#22. Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.
Ashwin Sanghi
#23. I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.
Sarah Dessen
#24. I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.
Elizabeth Kostova
#25. Like qualitative and quantitative research, historical references, and subject matter interviews - help UX designers to discover unique problems for a specific set of target customers.
Anonymous
#26. I'm an author with a penchant for research. For me the part where I'm learning new facts comes before the story I weave
to make an entertaining read.
Marcia Fine
#27. 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
#28. There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.
John Dominic Crossan
#29. Coconut oil has been described as the "World's Healthiest Dietary Oil". There is a mountain of historical evidence and medical research to verify this fact
Bruce Fife
#30. For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
Edward Rutherfurd
#31. Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.
Sara Sheridan
#32. 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
#33. It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.
Sharon Kay Penman
#34. I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
Kate Mosse
#35. I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.
Luke Evans
#36. 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
#37. There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.
Edmund White
#38. I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
Jean M. Auel
#39. Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
#40. Here's a news flash: scientists can be wrong. That's no big deal (unless the scientist is you), since research is self-correcting. Consequently, most errors by scientists become historical curiosities, with little long-term importance.
Seth Shostak
#41. I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.
Jami Attenberg
#42. No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied ... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.
Heinrich Schliemann
#43. Instead of giving it [war] a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.
Sasa Stanisic
#44. The church lives because it witholds the results of the historical Jesus-research from you
Hans Conzelmann
#45. The research in Ralph Keyes' The Quote Verifier is impressive, and each conclusion is like the solution to a real-life historical mystery. Who knew a reference book could be so entertaining?
Will Shortz
#46. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
John Dominic Crossan
