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There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

I just love historical fiction.

I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.