Top 77 The Historical Novel Quotes
#1. Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.
Sharon Kay Penman
#2. The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.
Mary Pope Osborne
#3. I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.
Hari Kunzru
#4. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
George R R Martin
#5. What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. Such
Leo Tolstoy
#6. Nothing good in this world comes free! For everything there's a payment of time or money or soul!
Kellyn Roth
#7. This is a time of change," the Shaman said. "This is a time of enormous power.
P.J. Parker
#8. Do not fret, my brother, my child. For the buffalo will roam the plains once more.
P.J. Parker
#9. 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
#10. I keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves 'Downton Abbey' will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
Julia Quinn
#11. I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#12. I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.
Louis MacNeice
#13. I sincerely pity the poor man you marry. I doubt he'll have a moment's peace.
Heather King
#15. The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.
Eric Sloane
#16. I'm an idiot for trying to avoid these feelings because they have caused me pain in the past.
Kellyn Roth
#17. One should learn to connect the bridge between the heart and the mind. That's what crowns you with eternity, and makes you the master of your own life rather than a slave of someone else's.
Iva Kenaz
#18. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
Vladimir Nabokov
#19. The virtuous are among the the weakest and quickest to sin
Aziz Hamza
#20. 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
#21. The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history ... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel ...
Jose Emilio Pacheco
#22. 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
#23. It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.
Ayn Rand
#24. If Miss Elton spoke water instead of words, then there would have been a repetition of Noah's flood.
Kellyn Roth
#25. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.
Shiree McCarver
#26. The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.
Erik Larson
#27. Father has taught me that when something is lost, whether dear or not, giving up the search is sometimes best and often enough the lost article finds its owner.
Cassandra Krivy Hirsch
#28. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
#29. Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilised than this gang on the sauce.
Naomi Wood
#30. Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.
Jim Crace
#31. My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
Eleanor Catton
#32. when you walk the path of revenge, know that someone will always follow your trail
Aziz Hamza
#33. I know you do not think very highly of me, but in some circles, I'm quite the thing.
Jessie Clever
#34. As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor ... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.
Mary Renault
#35. If the gods chose Sextus as King of Rome, the worst possible evil will befall it
Aziz Hamza
#36. You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Alfred Bester
#37. I refuse to believe the people of Texas and all Americans in the world have forgotten us.
P.J. Parker
#38. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
#39. When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.
Tim Pratt
#40. Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
- Winston S. Churchill
Ellen Brazer
#41. I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
Deborah Harkness
#42. I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.
Rachel Kushner
#43. Discourses, which are mostly wrapped in spurious religious and patriotic ideologies that ignite the enthusiasm of the ignorant masses
Aziz Hamza
#44. If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.
Louis L'Amour
#45. Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.
Kellyn Roth
#46. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#47. Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.
Janette Turner Hospital
#48. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#49. History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.
Aziz Hamza
#50. Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.
Rachel Kushner
#51. Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time.
Samuel R. Delany
#52. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.
Malcolm Blair-Robinson
#53. However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
Helen Dunmore
#54. If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
Louis L'Amour
#55. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.
P.J. Parker
#56. Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet?
P.J. Parker
#57. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Susanna Kearsley
#58. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.
Martha Grimes
#59. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.
P.J. Parker
#60. The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman
Lisa Barr
#61. (The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)
Nancy B. Brewer
#62. Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
Hilary Mantel
#63. If queens did not exist, the poets would have had to invent them, so necessary as they are to a nation's glory.
Lise Arin
#65. The early morning sunshine shot up the ice-covered valley. It glinted off the backs of slumbering mastodon, reflected between the antlers of caribou.
P.J. Parker
#66. I brought you something. It's my sister's coat. It
gets cold in Nashville in the wintertime.
Nancy B. Brewer
#67. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
Julia Alvarez
#68. Skip your fancy talk, Captain Lord Blackthorn. If I do your bidding, and I'm still discussing that with the Almighty, it will only be to save my arse." Katie O'Reilly to Captain Lord Jack Blackthorn in "Titanic Rhapsody
Jina Bacarr
#69. A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
Edward Hirsch
#70. For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I've always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!
Asaad Almohammad
#71. West Point - The Key to the Continent and Independence.
P.J. Parker
#72. It is said you are the woman who holds all of London in the palm of her hand."
"Perhaps not all of London, Your Grace, but a fortunate few have indeed felt the palm of my hand.
Joanna Shupe
#73. We the People . . . The People of the Long House.
P.J. Parker
#75. I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#76. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.
P.J. Parker
#77. 'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.
Pamela Sargent
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