Ken Hakuta Quotes

I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.

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.

Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation.

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

We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.

Most of us get our history through story.

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.

There's a difference between knowing what's on the page in a history book and actually feeling that page have curves and valleys.

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

A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

This [Washington DC] is a town of anecdotes.

Presidents live and work in a house of history. They dwell with ghosts. Present power and the weight of the past are ambient realities of daily life in the presidency, and the two are intimately connected.

The success of 'Rome' was in making the history accessible and giving viewers everyman characters through which they can connect to historical figures. It stops the story from being too remote.

You really do live through someone's life when you hear him six hours a day.

When I saw the 'Geronimo' script and was offered the part, it was overwhelming in that it brought back all of those feelings - made me feel what it's like to be in those shoes, the same shoes Geronimo himself might have been in.

To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.

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.