Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.

— H. L. Mencken

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a…

— John Dos Passos

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they…

— Michael Korda

“A novelist is really nothing more than an historian of a people who have no history.”

— Federico Gamboa

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age.

— Sara Sheridan

“The historian will tell you what happened, the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” E.L. Doctorow”

— Anonymous

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone…

— C. S. Lewis

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians…

— Tom Hayden

The historian amputates reality.

— Gaetano Salvemini

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect…

— Goldwin Smith

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

— Karl Kraus

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of…

— Joseph Wood Krutch

“military historian Richard Holmes.”

— Clare Wright

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

— James A. Garfield

We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what…

— John Dryden