A Quote by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Real stories - whether in pure fiction or historical - have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Quote Topics

About Certain Curious Endlessly Fiction Historical Hope Hungry Illuminate Indefinable Learning Past Power Present Pure Real Stories Whether Will

Quote Author

Simon Sebag Montefiore
British - Historian
Born: June 27, 1965

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

Lauren Willig

We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.

Paulo Coelho

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R. R. Martin

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.

Antony Beevor

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

Junot Diaz

I remain curious about all the lives I can't have - and about the lives of others, real and imagined, past and present, and how people came to be who they are... and who they might yet be. I am enchanted by the landscape of possibility.

Jay Neugeboren

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

Neal Stephenson

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

Les Wexner

I believe in what science fiction can do, which is it can set up simple rules that it has to follow to try to illuminate something about the present that is somewhat invisible to us.

Brit Marling

"Hard" science fiction probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.

Jack Williamson

Worship will never end; whether there be buildings, they will crumble; whether there be committees, they will fall asleep; whether there be budgets, they will add up to nothing. For we build for the present age, we discuss for the present age, and we pay for the present age; but when the age to come is here, the present age will be done away.

N. T. Wright

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

Pamela Sargent

Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Milan Kundera

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

Roxane Gay

History is important because it teaches us about past. And by learning about the past, ypu come to understand the present, so that you may make educated decisions about the future.