Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

After A Certain Age - And For Some Of Us That Can Be Very Young - There Are No New People, Beasts, Dreams, Faces, Events: It Has All Happened Before.

All Things Come Alike To All; There Is One Event To The Righteous, And To The Wicked; To The Good And To The Clean, And To The Unclean; To Him That Sacrificeth, And To Him That Sacrificeth Not.

In Times Of War, As Everyone Knows, Who Has Lived Through One, Or Talked To Soldiers When They Are Allowing Themselves To Remember The Truth, And Not The Sentimentalities With Which We All Shield Ourselves From The Horrors Of Which We Are Capable ... In Times Of War We Revert, As A Species, To The Past, And Are Permitted To Be Brutal And Cruel. It Is For This Reason, And Of Course Others, That A Great Many People Enjoy War. But This Is One Of The Facts About War That Is Not Often Talked About.

I Think A Writer's Job Is To Provoke Questions. I Like To Think That If Someone's Read A Book Of Mine, They've Had - I Don't Know What - The Literary Equivalent Of A Shower. Something That Would Start Them Thinking In A Slightly Different Way Perhaps. That's What I Think Writers Are For. This Is What Our Function Is.

The First Casualty In Any War Is The Truth. In World War Ii, I Was Part Of A Group Of People Who Used To Meet Once A Week With The Sole Purpose Of Analyzing The News And Trying To Work Out What We Weren't Being Told. We Thought That We Were Clever, But We Had Absolutely No Idea What Was Really Going On. It Was Only Years Later That We Learned The True Story.