Historical Quotations | Page 5

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

With this, I'm holding up a mirror to society, and every aspect of the story actually has a historical precedent.

Demanding historical (or scientific) veracity as a prerequisite for truth is another kind of tunnel vision. To do so is to mistake poetry for prose.

I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

I have starred in the endless sky, where only clouds can run free, understanding that if will go beyond those clouds, if I conquer the entire universe I will conquer NOTHING, because this is a lie too, as big as I am, a mere Illusion of my Life or other bloody illusions of the lives of other that loose themselves in their reflection in other destinies giving birth to the historical evolution of this lie and with it to the holy book of the spirituality of peoples, in fact the holy book of the spirituality of illusions that were once reflected as images, just like flashes in the Great Void-Being.

I invented the historical spy novel.

Disneyworld...is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.