History Quote by Anonymous

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

— E. L. Doctorow

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

— Edmond de Goncourt

“A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.”

— John Irving

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

“Anyone who's indifferent to the fate of Edwin Drood is okay in my book.”

— James Owen

“It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“If you're going to write histories, Tarly, you have to do the research, Archmaester Ebrose, Game of Thrones S7”

— George RR Martin

“We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely…

— Julian Barnes

“Rooting arguments in evidence and respecting scholarly norms, historians must craft stories that shape the future as well as the past.”

— Michael J. Lansing

“The novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and…

— Julien Green

“The best fiction rises – yes, like a phoenix – out of the ashes of people’s sad, true disasters. We write in order to…

— Chuck Palahniuk

“We all write fiction when we write about the past.”

— Stephen King