Top 100 Quotes About Writing History
#1. 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
#4. I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it.
Kanye West
#5. Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Joss Whedon
#6. [While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
David McCullough
#7. 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
#8. 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
#11. The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
Victor Hugo
#12. Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
Gustave Flaubert
#13. I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals ... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
Louis L'Amour
#14. I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.
David McCullough
#15. I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
William Monahan
#16. It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
Woodrow Wilson
#17. The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#18. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#30. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.
S.A. Tawks
#31. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
#32. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.
F. Sionil Jose
#33. Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
Beck
#34. See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.
John Muir
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. My history is really playing live - not writing or recording.
Tom Jenkinson
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality.
M.T. Bass
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#51. 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
#52. Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain.
Ani DiFranco
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs." But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note."
Richard Conniff
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
#65. It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.
Helen Keller
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
#72. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
John Ruskin
#73. When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#74. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#75. I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.
Ruby Bentall
#76. Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
#77. The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
A. Whitney Brown
#78. I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.
David Talbot
#80. (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
#81. I've always viewed history as my personal treasure chest.
Sara Sheridan
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here.
Donald Murray
#91. The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.
John Keegan
#92. I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.
Winston Churchill
#93. 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
#94. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
Richard Marius
#99. History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels.
Jan Smuts
#100. 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
