I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force

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

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.