Scottish "novelist, poet, historian, biographer".
He is often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.
There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine."
"When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing, he has one good reason for letting it alone."
The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention . . . . It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.
"To be always intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed."
"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!"
