The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
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The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two FacesHenry James
Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.
Wystan Hugh Auden
It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.
Mircea Eliade
David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.
Christopher Hitchens
It’s not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents. Spin Magazine, Vol. 10 No.4, 1994
Kary Mullis
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
Shelby Foote
James, Henry
James, Cheryl
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