Bruno Heller Quotes

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.

It must be recognized that the real truths of history are hard to discover. Happily, for the most part, they are rather matters of curiosity than of real importance.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

All history, so far as it is not supported by contemporary evidence, is romance.

Falsifiers of history do not safeguard history but imperil it.

When you're filming in Russia in Catherine's Palace, and you're in the real place where the Tsar's ball really happened, all those years ago, it does so much of the work for you. It's so vivid. You escape into this different time through the costumes, the sets and the atmosphere.

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

The closer you can get to your setting and to primary sources, the more authentic your history is going to be.

I have met so many young people who do not see the church as relevant and do not consider the Bible a real book of history that can be trusted.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.