Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

Fearlessness is a fool's boast, to my mind. The only men with no fear in them are dead, or the soon to be dead, maybe. Fear teaches you caution, and respect for your enemy, and to avoid sharp edges used in anger. All good things in their place, believe me. Fear can bring you out alive, and that's the very best anyone can hope for from any fight. Every man who's worth a damn feels fear. It's the use you make of it that counts.

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

History is littered with dead good men

I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.