I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.