Felt Quote by E. L. Doctorow

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

— Anonymous

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

— V. S. Pritchett

“We may choose to freeze a moment and say that it all 'began' then, but as an historian I have to tell you that…

— Julian Barnes

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

— Nathan Englander

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

— Martin Cruz Smith

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

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

— Peter Morgan

The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the…

— Walter Millis

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

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

— Philippa Gregory

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and…

— E. L. Doctorow

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

— Kazuo Ishiguro