15 Quotes by James Alexander Thom

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “a distillation of rumor,” or, as Napoleon said, “a set of lies generally agreed upon

Some writers don't believe they're ready to begin writing the story until they've finished all the research they can think of to do — until they're sure of everything. That's a logical approach, of course. The more factual knowledge, the less likelihood you'll have to throw out a lot of glorious prose when you find out that something you assumed to be true wasn't.But one problem with delaying your start until the research is all done is that the research is never all done.

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means “dead hand.” Its definition is: “The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

Probably the most honest “self-made person” ever was the one we heard say: “I got to the top the hard way – fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.”

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

If there is a rumor in the air about you, you’d better treat it as you would a wasp: either ignore it or kill it with the first blow. Anything else will just stir it up.

Once upon a time it was now.

He remembered another one of his mother’s saying. It was back when she’d birthed Fanny, her tenth. Someone had siad it was about time she gave up mothering and rested. “Nay,” she had said. “I’ve started something, and now I wouldn’t stop if I could, and I couldn’t stop if I would.