But try as I might, I never got to eat any of her pastries, and do you know, she never even offered me one.

Genuinely good people are like that. The sun shines out of them. They warm you right through.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

Unless you can be in a place yourself and go through the subject of your story yourself, the next best thing is not to read a book about it, or see a movie about it, it's to talk to the people who've been there.

This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse, and specially in a horse like this. God got it right the day he created them. And to find a horse like this in the middle of this filthy abomination of a war, is for me like finding a butterfly on a dung heap. We don’t belong in the same universe as a creature like this.

But I didn’t dare. That has always been my trouble. I’ve never dared enough.