How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?

My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

The most interesting people are never perfect.

When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.