James A. Michener Quotes

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Mollie Hunter was both a great friend and a very fine writer for children. She was fascinated by Scotland's history and its folklore - almost all her novels reflect her tremendous knowledge of both.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History seems to be so clumsy.

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

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

I don’t like trying to predict the future. I am a historian. I have enough trouble predicting the past.

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

… history turns out as always to be too messy, contingent and subject to the vagaries of human agency to be slotted into neat boxes.

I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Here's all I know: that the world is uncontrollable. Chaos reigns. That anything and everything might be possible. I won't subscribe to any rational system again. Nothing will bind me.

A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through; at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

History is as much an art as a science.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

That's the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn't.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.