All writing comes by the grace of God.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can — it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

I am only a pencil in the hand of God, but it is He who writes.

I am but a small pencil in the hand of a writing God

History is God's providence in human affairs.

Indeed rhetoricians are permitted to lie about historical matters so they can speak more subtly.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

All literature is gossip

Even the earliest colonial historians, like William Bradford and Robert Beverley, knew that; they put conscious art into their narratives. And the historians of our classical period, Prescott and Motley, Irving and Bancroft, Parkman and Fiske, were great literary craftsmen. Their many-volumed works sold in sufficient quantities to give them handsome returns; even today they are widely read. But the first generation of seminar-trained historians, educated in Germany or by teachers trained there, imagined that history would tell itself, provided one was honest, thorough, and painstaking. Some of them went so far as to regard history as pure science and to assert that writers thereof had no more business trying to be “literary” than did writers of statistical reports or performers of scientific experiments. Professors warned their pupils (quite unnecessarily) against “fine writing,” and endeavored to protect their innocence from the seductive charm of Washington Irving or the masculine glamour of Macaulay.

Everyone's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers.

I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths.

We are all pencils in the hand of God.