Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Clinton Van Doren

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

Marissa Moss

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

Thomas Mallon

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Tom Hulce

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Brian Eno

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Kara Walker

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction.

Anita Diament

When I turned 40, I wanted to do something different. Fiction offered a different challenge. It uses a different side of the brain.

Tahmoh Penikett

I love science fiction when it's well-done. I don't like campy stuff. I don't like stuff that's too fantastical.

Tom Bissell

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Laurie Levenson

The popularity of these programs has an impact. There is a blurring of fiction and reality.

Brent Spiner

I don't read fiction at all.

David Morrell

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Carl Barks

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

C. S. Lewis

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Sandra Cisneros

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

Brent Spiner

Hollywood has more than its share of harsh and crewel stories. In fact, it's probably more the norm than the exception.

Bret Easton Ellis

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Diane Setterfield

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

Diane Setterfield

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Diane Setterfield

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.