Dan Brown Quotes

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in 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.

When you revise history, you lose it.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

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.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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.

Leave history to historians.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

History is more or less bunk.