Writing History Quotes

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

I didn't write a ton before 'After,' to be honest.

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

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Please think about your legacy, because you're writing it every day.

I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem.

In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing.... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes.

The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

Not to be pompous about it - my thing in life is to write history and not to chat on TV 24 hours a day.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

Today’s events are tomorrow’s history, yet events seen by the naked eye lack the depth and breadth of human struggles, triumphs and suffering. Writing history is writing the soul of the past… so that the present generation may learn from past mistakes, be inspired by their ancestor’s sacrifices, and take responsibility for the future.

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.