Quotes About History

What attracted us and allured us to Old Trafford are all the great things, all the great history, and all the great heritage. People keep saying 'what are you going to change?' And the thing I keep saying is people aren't going to notice a change.

If the Bible is correct, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that means there were no dinosaurs, and museum curators have been messing with us. Or the dinosaurs were here, and we never noticed them. Or a lot of people saw them but didn't want to say anything.

It's such a big deal, the notion that these enslaved Africans had marriages and children... because therein lies our humanity, our capacity for love.

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same.

I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.

I think that Judaism has been, throughout its history since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that's all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I'm in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we're all Jewish. It doesn't seem to me that we're supposed to all be Jewish.

I'm a big believer in the notion that to know where you are going, you have to know where everything has been.

I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.

'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

America was magnificently characterized in November of 2008 when we elected, for the first time, an African-American President of the United States.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?