. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

Sitting around miserable all day won't make you any happier.

Today people can see and protest all the different interests that want war to happen, the people it financially benefits. The First World War wasn't fought for that reason. The Second World War wasn't fought for that reason. Your entire country and way of life could be overtaken.

But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.

I like the idea of standalone novels. I always found with series of books, it's something that publishers love obviously because they can make a lot of money and they build an audience from book to book, but I don't like that as a writer. I prefer the idea of just telling a story, completing it within your book, and moving on and not forcing a child to read eight of them.

It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you've ever known before.