I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.
They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.
The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.
A weak people and its equally debilitated leaders are bludgeoned by history. It maims them into the cripples that they are meant to be.
Over the years, over the history of our country, liberals have stood on many of the right sides of the issues.
Just think, if I had understood my lawyer and if he and I had communicated properly in January 1958, this whole history would have been entirely different .
Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
If the Philippines must remain under the control of Spain, they will necessarily have to be transformed in a political sense, for the course of their history and the needs of their inhabitants so require.
I like reading history, and actually most authors enjoy the research part because it is, after all, easier than writing.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.
I pass no judgment about historic events. I defend the human freedoms. Whatever event has taken place throughout history, or hasn't taken place, I cannot judge that.
Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.
Before I'm a zombie nerd, before I'm a science-fiction nerd, I am a history nerd.
Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history.
Sudan cannot afford to be on the wrong side of history. The north and south will have to work together, but will they?
In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
