A Quote by Joseph Conrad

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad

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Artist Experience Historian Human Human Experience Keeper May Novelist Too

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Joseph Conrad
Polish - Novelist
December 3, 1857 - August 3, 1924

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

David Starkey

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Penelope Lively

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

Odd Nerdrum

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

Christopher Hitchens

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

Agatha Christie

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

Shailer Mathews

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.

Amanda Foreman

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

E. M. Forster

The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

C. V. Wedgwood

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

Alexis Ohanian

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

A. J. P. Taylor

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

Howard Zinn

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

Hilary Mantel

A Quote by Joseph Conrad

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