Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff — the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.

Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did.