Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

War continues to divide people to change them forever and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

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.

Be polite write diplomatically even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

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.