Zephyr Teachout Quotes

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

Sometimes when I travel, I like to close my eyes and imagine visiting during another era.

I had a pretty hilariously gloomy few years in the '70s.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?

Whenever I go on holiday, I like to time travel and imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago. I love the Tuscan landscape, which is reminiscent of a Claude Lorrain painting.

Movies are movies: they take you back in time, and how it still is for some.

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

I have to choose my words carefully because I don't want to sound like one of those who goes on about how things were better in my day.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

We deserved it. I mean, if you get a pummeling, you deserved it. But isn't it wonderful to remember a time that America was once so innocent that all we had to worry about was the next 'Batman' movie?

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

I love watching 'Twilight Zone.' New Year's Eve they do the marathon; I watch it every year.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

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.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.

I try to look in the future and think backwards. That is when I am at my most comfortable. Because then I am just like the movie, 'Back to the Future.'

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

The past is another planet.