Umberto Eco Quotes

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

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

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.

The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

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.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

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

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.