It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

It is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.

It's getting late. I must return to my ship or my men will think I've drowned and be celebrating.

Treasures are not won by care and forethought but by swift slaying and reckless attack.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.