Andre Aciman Quotes

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

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

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.

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

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

World history is a court of judgment.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.