Historical Novels Quotes

• 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

  Giving, Perspective, Modern Life

  Source: www.yabookshelf.com

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• Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

  Louis L'Amour

  Teaching, Desire, Events

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.15, Bantam

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• I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

  Peter Carey

  Book, Past, Curiosity

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• Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Writing, Asking, Answers

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• Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

  Lauren Willig

  Cousin, Reality, Class

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Trying

  "Fantasy Author George R.R. Martin: Blood of Bayonne". Interview with Joanna Buffum and Dylan Runco, njmonthly.com. March 15, 2013.

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• 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

  Thinking, Way, Merit

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• [My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Feet, Eight, Hands

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• I have rarely read a more wonderful book than To Win Her Favor by Tamera Alexander. Rich with historical detail and fully developed characters, this novel held me spellbound until the last page. If you read one historical novel this year, make it To Win Her Favor. It will linger with you long after the last page.

  Colleen Coble

  Book, Character, Winning

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• 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

  Details, London, Spheres

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• 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

  Character, Past, Careers

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.62, Indiana University Press

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• 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

  Powerful, Fiction, Stories

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Thinking, Careers

  "Hilary Mantel, In Brief". Interview with Seymour Glass, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 30, 2014.

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• When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

  Nicholas Meyer

  War, Gone, Research

  Source: collider.com

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• With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history.

  Nicholas Meyer

  Taken, Character, Poetic License

  Source: collider.com

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• I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Literature, Cloaks, Fluttering

  "Redemption songs". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

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• I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

  Matthew Tobin Anderson

  Stories, Wells, Feels

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• It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

  Elie Wiesel

  Book, Captivity, Pages

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Past

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• I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

  Raymond E. Feist

  Writing, Fantasy, Imaginary

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• There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

  Peter Straub

  Travel, Book, Adventure

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• Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

  Laila Lalami

  Past, Complexity, Particular

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• Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Book, Writing, Eight

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• I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

  Irvine Welsh

  Writing, Character, Reality

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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

  Origin Of Life, Privatization, Private Life

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