Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie but if you have plans for a war in Iraq and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.

And I'm a slow writer: five six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

We need to decide that we will not go to war whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media because war in our time is always indiscriminate a war against innocents a war against children.

War contains so much folly as well as wickedness that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

In war when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance he no longer deserves victory.

Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

The universal medicine for the Soul is the Supreme Reason and Absolute Justice for the mind mathematical and practical Truth for the body the Quintessence a combination of light and gold.