Saul David Quotes

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

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

I love historical fiction because there's a literal truth, and there's an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

I like writing historical fiction.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

I like reading history, and actually most authors enjoy the research part because it is, after all, easier than writing.

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.

Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.

Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.

Writers of historical fiction are often faced with a problem: if they include real-life people, how do they ensure that their make-believe world isn't dwarfed by truth? The question loomed large as I began reading 'The Black Tower', Louis Bayard's third foray into historical fiction and fifth novel overall.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.