Michael Korda Quotes

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

There is always a reason why, and I need to tell the stories.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

You never know how history is going to view things.

You must read history forward and not backward.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

I just wanted to tell good stories that helped explain the world to people.

I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.