Ernest Gaines Quotes

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

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.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.

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

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

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

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.

You know, all writers are vampires and they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in.