Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

In counterfactual history, nothing is certain.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

In the many-mansioned house of Alternate History, I occupy a small corner. The trio of what-ifs I chronicled in 'Then Everything Changed' all begin with tiny, highly plausible twists of fate that lead to hugely consequential shifts in history.

'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.

If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it.

There are bound to be deniers. Whenever you set up a thesis there's bound to be somebody who comes the opposite way …like Holocaust deniers.

It was around 1985 before I heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I've had in my life has been wrong.

Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.

THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.

I'd never been interested in the Kennedy assassination until '88, when I read Libra. And from that point, I went out and bought the existing Kennedy theory books, most of which are outlandish. But what DeLillo posits - some rogue CIA guys - is the most dramatically sound, plausible explanation for it.

I would've written this story [Django] if [Barack] Obama were president or if he never existed. For one, I think it's time to tell a story that deals with this subject America has avoided for so long. Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities of their past that still affect them to this day. But America has been pretty slippery in the way that it has avoided looking slavery in the eye. I believe that's a problem.