Historical fiction

"I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Coburg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."

"His is a mind brooding over antiquity—scorning "the present ignorant time." He is "laudator temporis acti"—a "prophesier of things past." The old world is to him a crowded map; the new one a dull, hateful blank."

"All the time I was at work on the Two Cities, I read no books but such as had the air of time in them."

"Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen."

"Those who put the historical novel in a category apart are forgetting that what every novelist does is only to interpret, by means of the technique which his period affords, a certain number of past events; his memories, whether consciously or unconsciously recalled, whether personal or impersonal, are all woven of the same stuff as history itself."

"Black Robe is an historical novel, in a way, but it doesn't give you the heavy padding that historical novels do. They do a lot of research and then they must put the research in. I don't believe in that. Do a minimum of research, and then keep it out. Don't let it impede the story."