A Combination Of All That Was Best

People Make A Grievous Error Thinking That A List Of Facts Is The Truth. Facts Are Just The Bare Bones Out Of Which Truth Is Made.

People Want To Know Why The South Is So Interested In The Civil War. I Had Maybe, It's A Rough Guess, About Fifty Fistfights In My Life. Out Of Those Fifty Fistfights, The Ones That I Had The Most Vivid Memory Of Were The Ones I Lost. I Think That's One Reason Why The South Remembers The War More Than The North Does.

If You Want To Study Writing, Read Dickens. That's How To Study Writing, Or Faulkner, Or D.h. Lawrence, Or John Keats. They Can Teach You Everything You Need To Know About Writing.

The Point I Would Make Is That The Novelist And The Historian Are Seeking The Same Thing: The Truth – Not A Different Truth: The Same Truth – Only They Reach It, Or Try To Reach It, By Different Routes. Whether The Event Took Place In A World Now Gone To Dust, Preserved By Documents And Evaluated By Scholarship, Or In The Imagination, Preserved By Memory And Distilled By The Creative Process, They Both Want To Tell Us How It Was: To Re-create It, By Their Separate Methods, And Make It Live Again In The World Around Them.

And I'm A Slow Writer: Five, Six Hundred Words Is A Good Day. That's The Reason It Took Me 20 Years To Write Those Million And A Half Words Of The Civil War.