Ron Rash Quotes

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

I'm a conduit for telling people's stories. It's a privilege.

I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.

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

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.

I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.

If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian.

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

There's a hidden history. You see, Malcolm X and [Alex ] Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together.

My main goal is to tell a story.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.