Mark Schwartz Quotes

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

The historian has a special obligation to sobriety and fidelity to the record.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

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.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

Film is just a different version of what we did round the campfire when we were Neanderthals. We tell stories so people can learn things and relativise things.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

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

The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.