Tom Mison Quotes

I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

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

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.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.

It's interesting because I haven't done a lot of period work in the past, but I always wanted to because I'm interested in history.

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

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

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I like writing historical fiction.

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

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.

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

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.

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.