Morris Gleitzman Quotes

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.

I'm a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'

I like the stories with the historical themes.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

I'm always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.

History is not made of up major media headlines and daily blogs and attacks.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

… words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize

The events of the time may be transmitted to posterity; but the agitation of the public mind can never be fully comprehended but by those who were witnesses of it

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.