Tom Weston-Jones Quotes

I'd always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they're born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

It often disturbs me, when I see a film set in a historical time, that the people are too modern.

There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.

It's not like I was trying to be sexy but I had to get fit because I had to be able to do stunts. Also I wanted that, if Bond took his clothes off, he looked like a man who did what he did, which was kill people for a living. I thought the only way to do that was to work out and get fit and buff and get physically into shape.

Portraying Alex Summers, I want to look as athletic as his character is in the comics.

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.

I find that with period pieces, you're sort of able to really take advantage of what's around you because prop-wise, wardrobe-wise and location-wise, it's all so specific due to that time.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.