When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.