...I became interested  in the slippage between personal histories and social or national histories...I felt I had now lived long enough to have lived in something I experienced as ‘history’...I was doing historical research on things I had in some sense lived through. And this sense of the edge between lived and imagined history made me in turn interested in a group of novels by...Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis - about the war they were too young to have experienced, their father’s war.  I was interested in images they had fabricated that didn’t quite ring true in my experience...I was interested in how their selection of subject-matter did and didn’t coincide with that of the older generation who had lived and fought in the war, my own father’s generation...Evelyn Waugh, Burgess...I was interested in narratives written during that historical cataclysm when its end was not known, histories without hindsight or foresight...
 
‘Fathers’ , On Histories and Stories , A.S. Byatt

...I became interested in the slippage between personal histories and social or national histories...I felt I had now lived long enough to have lived in something I experienced as ‘history’...I was doing historical research on things I had in some sense lived through. And this sense of the edge between lived and imagined history made me in turn interested in a group of novels by...Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis - about the war they were too young to have experienced, their father’s war.  I was interested in images they had fabricated that didn’t quite ring true in my experience...I was interested in how their selection of subject-matter did and didn’t coincide with that of the older generation who had lived and fought in the war, my own father’s generation...Evelyn Waugh, Burgess...I was interested in narratives written during that historical cataclysm when its end was not known, histories without hindsight or foresight...

-A.S. Byatt , ‘Fathers’ , On Histories and Stories

 

...Much later, I realized there were elements of me in both...I look back now and think, How lucky not to know what you're doing.

-William Kentridge in Calvin Tomkin's The New Yorker article, January 18, 2010