History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history they were at it all the time that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart.

In human history the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

The Deep South has a completely different history both good and bad that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions at certain stages of history perpetuate and produce such a deficit and even threaten human survival.

People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she or he is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

In fact history does not belong to us but we belong to it.