A Quote by Colum McCann

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Colum McCann

Quote Topics

Alternative Attempt Become Best Historians Writers

Quote Author

Colum McCann
Irish - Writer
Born: February 28, 1965

TV is no longer the best alternative to boredom. To kids not old enough for Snapchat, music is the best alternative to boredom. For Snapchat users, it's the best alternative to boredom.

Mark Cuban

That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.

Polybius

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Alice Dreger

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.

Harry Oppenheimer

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

James A. Michener

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

Hilary Mantel

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

Don DeLillo

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

F. Sionil Jose

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Raymond Chandler

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Michelle Dean

It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.

Nelson Mandela

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

D. James Kennedy

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Barry Unsworth

This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.