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.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Life should be embraced like a lover.

I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

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.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I wanted to be a part of the Disney history.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

What a year to live in! Worth all other times ever known in our history or any other.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

Out of Coltrane's whole history, there are things which I think are great from all the periods.

I got a call to come in and meet Fox, and the rest is history.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

It's a very good historical book about history.

Long after this wonderful event in the Earth's history, when the human species was spread over a good deal of Asia, Europe, and Africa, migration to the American continents began in attempts to find new feeding grounds and unoccupied areas for hunting and fishing.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.