Natural history is not about producing fables.
I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
I know that I'm already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.
No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.
In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.
If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.'
The Dangerous Alliance consists of the following - 'The Advocate' Paul Heyman and 'The Beast' Brock Lesnar. That Dangerous Alliance is the single most formidable faction in the history of sports entertainment. We don't need Four Horsemen. We don't need three Freebirds. We don't need a Legion of Doom.
The Shield had run its course as a three-man group, and we'll go down in history as one of the greatest factions of all time.
African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.
If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.
When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.
I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.
We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it's one of the traps we've fallen into over the course of our lives - to forget our history. That's why George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.
So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.
There's racist casting, and there is normal casting. Normal casting, to me, is a process that strives for representation and, in many cases, strives to simply portray the world as it actually is instead of as falsely non-inclusive. And sadly, sometimes that involves removing the whitewash that exists on history.
I think the history of the world suggests if one studies the Romans, and one studies the early Greeks, and one studies the history of the world, they all eventually falter if they don't come back to the basic aspect of integrity and honor and feelings of love one for another.
I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
When I was a boy, I would ask about my family history, about my bloodlines. We really didn't know that much. We had a little Indian in us from the Oklahoma Trail of Tears.
My sense of the family history is somewhat sketchy, because my mother kept a great deal to herself.
