Lion Feuchtwanger Quotes

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

It may not be art, but it is history.

… the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

I think about Shakespeare. Because there have been hundreds of variations of Shakespeare's plays since they've been written, and I believe it's because they're important. They're still relevant today. 'Roots' is still relevant today. The idea that we shouldn't tell this story again is very strange to me.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think it's really important to remake things. If you never remake the classics, no one would know Shakespeare.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.

History has always fascinated me. Coming from a family that has it's own regal history, I always like places that have a rich past.

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.

'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.