Kathryn Lasky Quotes

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.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

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

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

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.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

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

Leave history to historians.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

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

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

One has to confront history honestly.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

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

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

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.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

When you revise history, you lose it.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.