Howard Nemerov Quotes

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

Most of us get our history through story.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

History: Gossip well told.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

It is the winners who write history - their way.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

History is as much an art as a science.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.