Rachel Kushner Quotes

History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.

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

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

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

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.

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

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

Leave history to historians.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

History is more or less bunk.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.

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

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.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

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

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.