Michael Haneke Quotes

For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then. So my approach with the narrator is to question that, to leave that open, to underline the fact that this is uncertain.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

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.

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.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

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

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.

We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.

When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true." But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they're very different. There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.