Historical Writing Quotes

After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

'Colonel Roosevelt' is compelling reading, and Morris a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level.

Reading Edmund Morris's 'Colonel Roosevelt' is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.'

Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author's bold generalisations.

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

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

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

My true love is history, but I didn't know how I could make a living at it.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.