Top 1200 Writing History Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.

Ceni was very skilful - and he made history. He played for 25 years at Sao Paulo, more than 1,200 games, and that's an inspiration. Hopefully, I can build a history like that.

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

If heads of states fail to seize the opportunity of our entry into the third millennium to provide for a better government of planet Earth, history will not forgive them - if there is a history.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.

I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.

There is a difference between writing and being an author. Authors talk. I'm standing here talking now. This has nothing to do with writing.

The grand sweep of constitutional or political history is important, but a detailed history of daily life also gives you a wonderful insight into the strange mental worlds of people in the past.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

I don't think writing open-ended lyrics is necessarily an important part of writing good pop songs.

Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.

It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

I didn't take writing seriously at first - I didn't think I could do it. When I did, I fell in love with it. But writing is very lonely.

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions.

There's exceptional work being done on television. Some of our great writers are writing for television. When you have things to choose from, you typically go after the writing - unless you're going after the money. There are fewer opportunities in film to make money with good writing, unless you're an action hero.

In the preface to his great History of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher wrote: "Men wiser than and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave ..." It seems to me that the same is true of the much older [geological stratigraphical] history of Europe.

I chose law because writing was involved. I didn't realize how boring legal writing was, but I even learned to love that.

It's interesting to think about the history of Israel in relation to the history of the U.S.. There were Native Americans living here that U.S. settlers totally displaced, and that narrative is not connected with the Isreal-Palestinian struggle at all.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

I am convinced that much more emphasis should be placed on history. The purpose of history is to learn how human beings react when exposed to the danger of wounds or death.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

Once I get my writing done, then I can turn my attention elsewhere - and not the other way around. The writing has to be the foundation.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Being a writer involves writing. You've got to commit to sitting down and writing instead of Xbox or Netflix.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

History, when rightly written, is but a record of providence; and he who would read history rightly, must read it with his eyes constantly fixed on the hand of God. This statement of a nineteenth-century historian sums up the responsibility of the Christian teacher of history, for he who would teach history or any subject matter rightly, must teach it with his eyes constantly fixed on the hand of God.

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that's gone into my song writing.

To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ...it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.

It's insane to be a writer and not be a reader. When I'm writing I'm more likely to be reading four or five books at once, just in bits and pieces rather than subjecting myself to a really brilliant book and thinking, "Well what's the point of me writing anything?" I'm more likely to read a book through when I take a break from writing.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

I've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.