If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.

I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.